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Betrayal In Antara So you might be thinking: Hang on, this sounds awfully similar to "Betrayal at Krondor," and you'd be right, it is! Intentionally! And made by many of the same people, too! See, Betrayal at Krondor sold poorly during its floppy launch, prompting Dynamix to sell the Midkemia license back to Feist and move on. But then when Betrayal got its CD launch, it sold well enough that they were suddenly nostalgic for making a game that made them money, so they straight up went: "what is the most Betrayal-esque game we can make, that feels really Betrayal-y, but uses an original license?" And so we got Betrayal in Antara four years later, and oh how the world had moved on during that time. We'd progressed from the wilderlands of DOS to the civilization of... Windows 3.1? What the gently caress? It absolutely makes this a huge mess to get running properly compared to BaK, every cutscene WILL crash the game unless set to an un-recordable resolution, but barring finding a solution to that, I believe all the cutscenes should be on YouTube for me to steal. Other improvements include something like 80% of the game's narration and dialogue now being voiced, which means I won't have to transcribe those parts! Instead you suckers are going to get stuck listening to it. There's also the graphics and general interface...  Behold! Playing the game is no longer like piloting a tank. Now instead it's like piloting a tank with the hatch popped so you can enjoy the wind in your hair, because inexplicably the controls are now much jankier and prone to ignoring input, even during basic stuff like typing save game names. And, of course, you can always return the interface to classic BaK style if you want to...  Revealing that we're no longer stuck with developers and their acquaintances in random Ren Faire finery but instead actual art. It's... somewhat bland art, not filled with a lot of stylistic flourishes, but it's a lot easier to take seriously than Pug's loving wig. The game world also looks more detailed and colourful but at the same time less crisp, everything about it looks kind of grimy and muddy. Still, it looks a lot more like a place than BaK did, and screenshots will be less infinitely repeating green corridors differentiated only by their amount of corpses lying around. Interactivity Another little complicating thing is that while Return to Krondor is almost completely linear, and Betrayal at Krondor is exhaustively documented even to an extent that I wouldn't have believed, no one gives a gently caress about Betrayal in Antara. Even the best FAQ's are threadbare and read like someone scribbled them on a sticky note, and none of them ever really engage with the game mechanics or explain when it's worth your time to go off-roading so, uh, I guess we're on a journey of discovery here, folks. This also contributes to this probably being a less interactive playthrough since frankly I'll have almost no idea what the gently caress I'm doing aside from barely-remembered tidbits from playing it when I was a kid where I seem to recall there were some absolutely busted spells you could whip out, so I can't really offer the thread many valuable choices to make since I have no idea what those choices are. Spoiler Policy lol as if any of you have ever played this loving game and remember it well enough to spoil anything. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 12:17 on May 21, 2023 |
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Dec 16, 2021 00:10
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Reserved for an update index. Update 1: A Nice Day Update 2: The Game Kicks My rear end Update 3: Still Avoiding The Plot Update 4: Just the Absolute Worst Update 5: Why Would They Do This? Update 6: Tea Update 7: A Peaceful Land Update 8: Need For Sleep Update 9: The Update With the Pope Update 10: Murder and Cheese Update 11: Fallout New Antara Update 12: Big Birds and Racially Motivated Violence Update 13: They Made It Worse Update 14: Get Into My Swamp Update 15: Lightning Bugs and Software Bugs Update 16: Computer Controlled Update 17: Molotov Cocktails?! Update 18: The Nightmare Ends PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Mar 23, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2021 00:10
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Vanigo posted:Oh, man, this game. I put way more time into this game than it deserved. Wait what? I can accidentally dead-man-walking myself for an entire chapter? Holy poo poo that's hosed! Thanks for the warning. Also the chapter 8 to 9 thing reminds me of VtM: Bloodlines, where at the end of one mission the game would always, ALWAYS gently caress up, and the only way to continue past that was to use console commands. I don't think it was ever officially patched, either, only by fan-patches.
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Dec 16, 2021 05:49
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Update 1: A Nice Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znasiW-3U7g I'll note that unlike this recording of the intro video, I chose the Normal difficulty.  Welcome to Antara! It's not Midkemia, but it'll do, especially since it looks a lot nicer. Despite being two years younger, the graphics conjure up a lot of Albion feel for me, something about the design of the sprites, probably. Unlike Albion, it isn't nearly as vividly coloured, and in fact everything has a sort of muddy graininess to it which is to the game's detriment. It got absolutely panned at release for this, with people complaining it looked like poo poo, but compared to Betrayal at Krondor, this is a breath of fresh air. No crusty-rear end digitized photo sprites, no terrible wigs, no everything being either green, white or sandy brown.  Let's take in the UI a little before we get moving. Much like BaK, each character is trapped in an orb for safe transport outside of cutscenes and combat, with their inventories and stat screens accessible by left and right clicking them respectedly. As a QoL bonus, the background colour of their orbs tells us if they're currently suffering from any conditions and the coloured circles are shortened and turn yellow and red as they suffer damage. In our lower right we have, clockwise from the top left, Camp, Flashback, Wizard, Options, Bookmark(Quicksave) and Map. The main thing that's interesting and new here is the Flashback menu which records all conversations you have by character you have it with, and allows you to fish them out instantly if you want to be reminded of the wording of a sidequest or hint. It's supremely handy and frankly more games should have it. Everything else should pretty much be self-explanatory. So time for something that isn't: the skills screen.   So remember how in BaK you just either tagged skills or left them untagged, and it would focus on them for training, and aside from that you could kind of leave them alone? In Antara I get heart palpitations trying to understand the manual or tutorial on how skills work. I can select up to five for training, and then tagging them in on on the TRAINING DISC in the upper left according to HOW MUCH I want to train them compared to others, with diminishing returns. Also skill-wise William is kind of like a Locklear to Aren's Owyn. They even left the hair colours the same, so it's not super subtle. I wonder who our Gorath will be? In any case, I'm sure that magic is-   So what's meant to happen is that you combine keywords to create spells which Aren then "researches" and eventually learns as time passes so he can use then in combat, but in practice something about the UI just baffled me and all that I could figure out was how to make the orbs make a variety of odd humming noises and occasionally spinning. Satisfying, I suppose, but not giving me any real war crimes.  Thankfully the game has an option to just automate all of this, which to me hints at their knowing this wasn't a very good or easily understood system. You generally don't add an option to let players opt out of things you feel are functioning well and are good core systems of your game. Setting automatic spell research on gets Aren researching the "Static Discharge" spell, which means he might know how to cast a spell in a few days' time. Not that we're going to be waiting for that, we've got places to go and things to see.  Like this cool crater of molten glass that Aren blasted out of the beach in the intro.  The trackless ocean.  And a corpse to loot.  I don't know, William. I never thought I'd be stealing from a dead man, that's no better than what a common cutthroat would do. We're just being practical, Aren. Look at it this way: nothing he's carrying can help him anymore, but it might help us.Verbatim from the game, by the way, William seems awfully casual about looting corpses despite ostensibly being a noble-born son.  The inventory screens are largely familiar, though it's worth noting that rations are now banished to their own, shared, sub-screen, so you no longer have to wrangle them into everyone's inventories and split them up properly per character and so forth. It's a nice quality of life change. What we're looking at there is the basic leather armor, some lockpicks, some "Senwater"(this game's Restoratives), some coins and some rations.   Once again, someone was pretty hungry while writing the various food descriptions. The rations are the least of it. Another big inventory change is...   Rudimentary paperdolls! I always enjoy it when games visually represent the stuff I slap on my idiots, makes it feel more satisfying to find new gear.   Having a look at William, let's also have a look at the weapons. In Krondor, weapons were relatively universal in that they had a more reliably hitting, lower-damage Thrust attack and a less reliably hitting, higher-damage overhead Swing attack. The amount of difference varied a bit, with a few weapons having exceptionally good Swings or Thrusts, but it was more or less the same. Antara varies it up by giving every weapon a Thrust, overhead Swing and sideways Slash attack. For our starting short sword, it largely goes in the same way as Krondor, with the Slash being in between the Thrust and Swing, and the difference between Thrust and Swing being a lot larger in terms of accuracy. It now also helpfully notes a previously obfuscated stat, Hardness, which indicates how easily a given weapon loses durability.  We can also look at the jewelry that we ganked off Gregor. Note the stylized shepherd on it, which is mildly interesting if you bothered to read the limited lore in the manual. The humans living here in Antara apparently arrived after being persecuted by a bunch of non-humans, learned wizardry, kept the non-humans at bay with magic, got wizard kings, got tired of wizard kings, now have a non-wizard Emperor. A subnote to this is that the group tasked with keeping an eye on future non-human invasions were named the Shepherds. This probably isn't a coincidence.  The local maps are also notably more detailed than they were in BaK and, if we turn it on, it will auto-mark shops and NPC's on the map for us. If you noticed the game had two difficulty sliders, the left one is the actual game difficulty and the right one is the "quality of life"-difficulty. For instance, at max, it disables both the automatic spell research, automatic skill training AND the automatic map tagging(they can be manually re-enabled in the options while playing, though), so it doesn't make the game harder, it just makes it a lot more annoying.  The game overworld map is... hm. It's hard to really say if it's a bigger or a smaller world than the central Kingdom in Krondor, but it's definitely a world with a lot more content in the sense of towns and villages. For the moment we're headed west to Briala, to tell everyone Aren's leaving home to become a wizard.    I was originally going to complain that Antara lacked the "lock on to roads"-function that Krondor had, but it's only on reviewing footage that I realized they just moved the button to the upper right so it could be used without calling up the bottom-of-screen bar. Also, we're about to get into a fight, which I don't yet realize because I haven't seen the enemy.   Do you see the enemy?  Maybe now? Yeah, it's that drooling lump off to the side that's the exact same colour as the grass it's slouching on. Motherfucker.   Combat is probably what's had the most changes. Aside from adding a third type of attack, they've also added rudimentary "zones of control." Every character "controls" the hex they face(the manual implies some enemies may have bigger ZoC's, but we'll see), and enemies can't freely move through it, or cast spells/fire arrows if they're in it. This means that touch-range spells are a thing now, as long as you can distract an enemy away from your mage. Enemies and characters also automatically turn to face whoever's attacking them in a given round.  In any case, with no magic and limited options, this first battle isn't very interesting except that this big komodo-looking fucker almost eats William. A worthwhile thing to do at this stage of the game is to have everyone using Thrust attacks, since they're about 10 percentage points more accurate than Swings for the weapons we have at the moment, and only slightly mess damaging(about 10 actual percent), and attacks that don't hit don't do jack.  Another supremely wonderful thing about Antara, though we won't see it here, is that when you kill a group of enemies and click on one corpse... they have a shared inventory. This means no more having to hunt around for the angle needed to pick over every corpse individually. It is probably my favourite quality-of-life adjustment between the two games.     Towns also look more... towny, with a variety of different buildings rather than just the same two copy-pasted over and over, shops have signs outside and we can actually read things without needing to click on them. Among other rad things...   Overworld NPC's are actually visible and voluntarily interactible with now, rather than just jumping out at you from the bushes whenever you enter their extremely vague interaction zones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y58yhAJRbuA Summary: It takes a bit, until William chips in, specifically, before Aren's father believes that he's actually done magic. At first he's a bit reluctant to let Aren go off on this adventure, but once William reminds him that he might accidentally blow up the tavern if he doesn't get proper training, he relents. I'm so glad all the dialogue is voiced now, otherwise I would have had to do work for this. For some reason the audio quality here seems to be worse than when I was recording it... but you can just mute it and read the dialogue if that's a problem. You're not missing out on the world's greatest voice acting. Since we're here, let's also check out the inn.  It's definitely a lot easier to parse than the inn interiors in Krondor, but it has that kind of uncanny weird effect you got with games like Quest for Glory 5, where you had character models slapped into pre-rendered backgrounds in a way that really made them pop and stand out. None of the locals here are interactible, by the way, except for the barmaid who sells rations and the fountain in the back that we can yank some coins out of. Having learned my lesson from Krondor, the only purchase I make is stocking the party up on enough food to sleep the year away if need be.  Across from the tavern is a small general store.   All of these are things I really want, but without a FAQ I don't know how many of each thing I need or how many of them I'm likely to be able to find at random around the gameworld. Plus I know that I need rations now, I don't know when I'll be dying, for, say, a length of rope.   Let's go hassle the other locals. Their dialogue isn't voiced, however.   Since it is, however, relatively compact, I decided to present it like this. Does this work well for everyone? Please don't make me transcribe it all. PLEASE. There's also a local farmer to harass.    Sweet, our first sidequest, and Balmestri isn't even in the completely opposite direction from where we're supposed to be going, only the mostly opposite direction! I'm sure this'll work out well.   As we pass through the center of town, we also come by this nice young lady hanging out by the well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRqORqLrdak Summary: Laura is, like Aren's father, a bit slow to believe that William's life has actually been turned upside down, but has less protests once she gets it. Aren and Laura say their goodbyes. So Laura here is Aren's future wife, possibly. I honestly can't recall if we ever see her again or if she ever features in the plot in any way, but I'd honestly be positively surprised if that was the case. We're still not leaving just yet, though, we have more locals to bother.       Sadly we can't invest in their chicken-themed future explosives industry, but we do know to keep an eye out for a Scott who may know something about magic. Even if he can't teach Aren anything about it, it sounds like he'll be good for a story or two.   If this was Krondor she'd have smacked William and Aren for non-trivial amounts of damage, I'm sure of it.      When this dialogue tree ended, the game made a mysterious "bwoim"-sound which probably meant something mechanical happened, but I couldn't figure out what. While checking out a threadbare Antara FAQ, however, I learned that doing this apparently provides a small Stealth bonus to the party. You'd have figured that getting covered in pigshit would result in the opposite, but I'm not arguing with a free boost.    Time to ignore the main plot and head south to Balmestri! We've got cows to save and I'm sure that Aren won't accidentally blow up a town along the way or something. As we cross the town boundary, though...  We hear a woman's voice crying out in distress!  And just what are you going to do about it? Did you hear that? Sounds like someone's in trouble. It came from over there! Looks like a pack of bandits up ahead, they must be the ones menacing a traveller or some such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cmbz3-zjt4 Not sure what William was trying to accomplish with that, but the practical upshot is that he landed us in a fight.  Admittedly a fight I wanted to be in, but still. Aren still has no spells and we're up against three enemies. I have very clear memories of getting my rear end kicked by this fight as a kid, so I approach it carefully, letting our protagonists guard and the enemies approach us.  They hit about as hard as the komodo from earlier but are much worse at actually landing blows, so it's mostly about getting Aren and William both ganged up on one enemy at once, taking him out, and then moving on to the next. Eventually the enemies start actually hitting, which takes some chunks out of William, but I pull through in the end.  Supposedly the enemy AI was pretty badly panned at launch, with claims that they'd sometimes randomly flee and such. I don't see any of that, but I do see some badly pressed enemies sometimes just not do anything. Not sure if they're spending their action defending or their decision-making gears just gummed up from having no good decision to make.  Now, let's see what nice person we've just saved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx3f-XoYeok Summary: Kaelyn grudgingly accepts that William helped her out because she can't stand his attitude, and forces herself into the party as much out of spite as anything. We're clearly not getting rid of her until she feels we've earned it. Kaelyn seems to be smarter than both of our young men and is therefore a valued addition to the party. She just sort of forces herself into the lineup whether you like it or not, and will be in the way, getting ambushed, whether you head south or west from Briala.   She also starts with a bow and is clearly intended to be more of an archer, but starting out archery is not very impressive either in terms of damage output or its odds of hitting.    drat, these guys were loaded. Maybe I should be skinning bandits instead of animals.Her existing armor is a bit threadbare so I swap her in a dead dude's coat. I'm sure she won't mind.   Reviewers at the time were apparently a bit hard on the "textured a wall as trees, this is a dense thicket now"-style, but I feel like it doesn't faze me. I've seen so many games do it that I just sort of "get" it as an abstraction and my brain doesn't even register it. I go poking around a bit by the water's edge here, hoping to stumble into something, and stumble into something I do!    Real, honest-to-God pirates. Hell yeah. Let's kick their asses and take their stuff.   So as visible here, the archery has less than half the chance of hitting compared to a melee attack, consumes ammo AND does barely half the damage of said melee attack. To spice things up, though, Aren has researched his first spell!  Touch range, does 25 damage, costs 10 health/stamina as magic works much like Krondor magic did in that sense. For now it does a bit more damage than his melee attacks(about 20 with each hit, usually a bit less), but is a guaranteed hit, which is very valuable since blitzing the enemy numbers down so we have more actions per round is important.  Not hugely impressive visually, but everyone has to start somewhere.   Repeated tazings put down these vicious corsairs, giving me a chance to paw through their stuff.   They've got several new things, like...  A weapon that's objectively worse than our starting shortswords unless I'm reading the stats wrong. I think, though, that the displayed stats reflect the badly damaged state of the cutlass, but sadly I can't repair it any.  Similar to the red potions in Krondor, Kor's Blood gives a temporary boost to melee skill.  I have to agree with the game here, more garlic is always an improvement on any cooking. I'm not sure if there are any actual differences between the different food types, mind you. Supposedly the non-ration food items are perishable and will be eaten first, but I can't see anything about how regularly they decay.   Past the pirates is this little stone mound that I can't crack into without a shovel. Have to hope I remember it's here once I get my hands on one...   Back on the road south, another pack of rogues blocks the way.  The fight itself is uninteresting except that I completely missed the super-obvious chest in the background right up until I was going through the footage. How did I miss that?! I look forward to cracking some chests, too, since they've upped the variety of security devices since Krondor.   With no one loitering on the streets, we may as well turn into the nearby tavern. Like in Krondor, you can't fully recover without magic or an inn, so I hope it is one, but it turns out to only be serving food, not rooms.  It does, however, have an exceptionally chatty fellow hanging around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cCWKtpio7o I rather like Scott's dialogue, he's a fun fellow and believable as a storyteller. Now, once again, the game refrains from loving telling you what happens here mechanically, but the result is that Aren gets +5 to his Create and Detect magic skills which might open up some more magic research for Aren. Of course, it'll still take him a while to complete said research and the game doesn't bother to tell you when some is completed, thus making it an exciting surprise when Aren suddenly has a new spell unless you obsessively check his spellbook after every rest and before every fight. It's annoying that for every other quality of life improvement they made, that one eluded them.  Of course, I hardly get out of the inn and manage to quicksave before the game crashes on me, even fully patched up, Antara is not a stable game, and I decide to hold the recording for the time being. Next time, we'll continue south to Balmestri, perhaps meet some more colourful characters and maybe get the party wearing something better than old leather rags and wielding something nicer than large knives. Next time: I'm sure we'll get to Panizo any month now PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 11:58
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Update 2: The Game Kicks My rear end Last time I made an executive decision to ignore the plot in favour of helping out some cows and I also managed to find a few resources with some very basic helpful info like, say, what items do. Because of course much like Krondor, half of the game's usable items have no manual or in-game description that clearly states what the hell their function is. One of the things I learned from said resources is that Antara is much stricter about "open" chapters. In Krondor, about half of the game's nine chapters left you with pretty free reign to range around 2/3rds of the game world, but Antara does not, so if you just go beelining for plot locations every time, you can very easily lose out on your only chance to visit certain areas. So with that, let's have a walk around Aspreza and see what's up.  First things first, let's check out the local store.   The local store which literally only sells shields and nothing else. They do also buy armor, allowing me to offload some of all the bandit/pirate clothes I've been picking up, but Antara stores in general tend to be a lot more specialized in what they sell than Krondor stores were. I do want some shields, though, I'd just rather not pay for them. Shields offer a flat amount of damage reduction while worn, have their own durability score and can't be repaired. Seeing as how they can't be repaired, I'm a bit loath to spend my extremely limited funds on them for now.Antara posted:Wooden Shield The two options are a Defense booster for characters and a Hardness booster for items, respectively. Antara posted:Steadfast Tonic Hardening Fluid initially seems really great except that it only lasts for one battle, so unless you have a very low-Hardness weapon that's nonetheless of high quality or expect a battle where you'll be handing out sword swings like candy, you usually won't get that much use out of it. For now, I just use the store to unload some of my spare armors and move on.  The little outhouse-looking shed just outside of the store is actually a coach stop. If we were flush with cash and lazy, we could use this to whisk us to other towns, but considering that enemies don't respawn, it's almost always cheaper to just buy some rations and race down the road if you've cleared the path between the two locations. And if you haven't cleared the path, absolutely get on that, those fuckers are worth training and carry stuff that's worth money.  Most of the houses in Aspreza have red diamonds painted on their doors, indicating that those within are suffering from the Feeblepox, a nasty disease that sometimes pop up in the Antaran Empire and fucks people up. No one inside wants to talk to us. There are two empty houses which contain spare leather armor(which we already have), a spare short sword(which we already have) and some cheese, and one non-plagued house which contains a resident we can actually talk to.     Of course, we always have time to save lost children, but first...  I was gonna loop back to this chest. Sadly it's just a normal pickable chest, not a puzzle chest. Lockpicking and trap disarming has also changed a lot mechanically since Krondor. In Krondor it was 100% deterministic, if you had the stat requirement, you passed all of the time, if you lacked the stat requirement you fail all of the time. Here, on the other hand, it's a random roll, so you just gotta spam lockpicking attempts and burn through picks until you get through. This is a bit more of a problem when we get to traps since every failed attempt is a reload, but it's a passable system for just normal locked chests and actually makes lockpicks a spendable resource rather than in BaK where you could potentially race through the game with just one single lockpick if you knew all the lock difficulties so you never used it on a chest or door you couldn't pick.After five clicks or so, Aren busts the chest. I'm not sure why he's the team member with the highest Lockpicking, both Kaelyn and William seem like thematically better candidates, but whatever. I guess that's some leftover Owyn DNA.  Antara posted:Tonguecoat The brooch is just for selling for money if I ever find a drat gem trader, while the Tonguecoat is a very handy booster that I keep forgetting when making expensive purchases because I am a moron and an idiot.   Heading south out of Aspreza, we pass by a Church of Kor with a few bandits hanging out around the back side and casually blocking us getting closer to the caves on the far side.  Unlike in Krondor where most temples had unique dialogue but the same services on offer(barring efficacy of blessings), temples in Antara generally have no dialogue but have one of three offerings of services. Temples of Kor, like this one, offer weapon and armor blessings, Temples of Senaedrin offer healing and curing, and Temples of Henne offer a vaguely defined "travel safety" blessing. Since A) our weapons at the moment are the cheapest crap in the game and B) the prices are exorbitant for this stage of the game, I pass on the blessings and continue on to get my rear end kicked by the bandits.   No, really, I spent close to 20 minutes getting my poo poo kicked in by these four assholes. See, because they had a mage I figured the smart move would be to sprint for him and take him down, at first, but since I couldn't reach him in one move that meant the bandits always got the first attacks in, which meant they wore me down faster every time. The closest I got to a win there was one time where William was the only survivor with a sliver of health left. Eventually I decide to take my chances with letting the mage do his mage bullshit and defend on the first turn so the bandits have to approach me and take the first hits.  Unlike in Krondor where this would have resulted in the mage nuking one of my party members out of existence each turn, here it just surrounds Aren with bubbles. I later learn that this is the spell Unseeing Eye which reduces all of a character's relevant combat stats, including movement, by 40% or 50%. This is bad, but less horrifying than many of the alternatives.   Despite the bubbles, victory is eventually mine. It's also worth noting that, as visible by the one coward pirate who doesn't want to get stabbed, enemies flee a lot more easily in Antara than they did in Krondor, where you might have the last enemy decide to leg it, here badly wounded enemies will often flee mid-battle. If you're confident and don't want to lose out on anything, position a party member in the rear leftmost hex, since that appears, as far as I can tell, to be the only one enemies can escape from. You'll probably want someone with spells or a ranged weapon there so they're still useful even if enemies keep their distance.    As another engine improvement, caves are no longer distinct zones, and you can just walk into them without a loading screen and an interaction! Or, at least, that's what the game pretends, it very obviously chugs for a second as it loads in the new zone inside and unloads the zone outside when you step over the threshold. But it's nice of them to try, in my opinion. Also I didn't bring any torches so this place is as dark as the inside of a troll's rear end in a top hat.  This means that sometimes I trip over some vague shapes in the darkness and they hiss and try to bite the party's feet off.  Carliths are more of the big lizard that almost ate William in the very first fight of the game, even four of them aren't really a threat, just a speedbump. But since they also don't drop anything, not even hides or teeth or organs or something else we can profit off of, I'm happy when a bunch of them try to retreat.    The real pain in the rear end are these Masliths instead. More vividly green and distinctly smaller than the Carliths, they seem to be roughly as good at biting and taking hits, but sometimes, at range, they instead choose to use a poison spit attack that ladles 5% poisoned status on to a party member. It only takes one drink of Senwater to cure 5% of a status(basically the exact same functionality as Restoratives in Krondor), so it's not a huge deal if they just do it once, but if their AI decides it's spittin' time and they start hauling out tons of poison, it can take a chunk out of the party's medicine supplies. There are dedicated anti-poison potions in the game which might be worth our time, but we've yet to have a chance to get a hold of any.   Fumbling around in the darkness I eventually bump into some rocky stairs and start climbing them.   Mmmm, cave cheese. And also a torch! Thank goodness. Now we can look at the surely gorgeous interior of this c-  I guess grainy brown is better than grainy black.    For some reason, though, enemy/character silhouettes in the dungeon tend to remain pitch black until you're almost right on top of them, even with a torch lit.    Except for the side paths with the single chest, the cave is more or less a straight line which leads to this pit in the ground, a pit with a kid in it.  A kid I can't save since I didn't bring any rope. I'm really knocking it out of the park here. Only place we have a store that sells rope is... all the way back at Briala. While I'm there, I also pick up a bundle of torches and a shovel, may as well crack into that little cairn of rocks we found while heading to Aspreza, right? Ha ha, joke's on me, turns out the cairn contains another loving shovel. Goddamn.So about ten minutes later...   Cool, let's head back and see if he made it back to his mom safely or if we need to fetch him out of another pit.       Mechanically, the reward for this quest is enough squidoroni to make up 14 ration packs, which means that Kaelyn will, in fact, be tasting squid for just shy of a week. Bet you wish we were carting around a bunch of hardtack instead, huh? Anyway, we're now free of obligations in Aspreza and can head further down the road to Balmestri.    The first encounter along the way is a group of bandits guarding a chest...  And it's our first code chest! Heck yeah! They're a bit different in that now instead of spinning single-letter wheels, you construct a word out of chunks you can select in any order and you aren't forewarned about what the exact length of the word will be. It definitely, in my opinion, makes it somewhat harder to brute force them. In any case, the answer to this one is C-U-TL-AS-S.  A half stack of Senwater and a half stack of rations is absolutely good rewards.  Aside from that chest, though, the only notable feature along the road from Aspreza to Balmestri is this thicket of white trees which splits the path in half. On the left side is a small pack of Carliths, and on the right side is a bandit ambush, though in my case the party spotted the ambush which meant initiative fired off as normal. Neither fight was particularly interesting, it's easy to tell we're largely still in the "tutorial" part of the game. Of course I write that and then I get overly confident on the next fight and it ends poorly.    The next group of enemies the party meets one-shots Aren when I have him burn too much health on spells. This triggers a Near-Death condition just like in Krondor, which means that unless you're ready to burn 20 Senwater to get someone out of it, you're going to be camping for the next month. The rewards for this?  A shield for William, another Brooch and a Pearl, neither of which I've yet to find a place to sell. Thankfully, gems are the smallest item in the game, and they only take up quarter spaces in the inventory, meaning that you can haul around large numbers of them without clogging things up.   Welcome to the southernmost town in Antara, time to hit up the local inn and see what they're serving.   The bow under the table is a tier 1 bow like Kaelyn's, which we can pick up for free and later sell for money since it's not worth using in combat 90% of the time. We can also listen to some folks singing a drinking song... Antara posted:Say, barkeep, set up four strong drinks. Technically only the first verse gets sung here, and we'd have to listen to the other verses at other inns, but by the time I got around to those inns, no one would remember the first verse and it's hardly like there's any spoiler material in them, it's just an in-universe, mildly blasphemous drinking song. I like the writing of it. We can also have a chat with a farmer up by the bar...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cdinaCuDhA Summary: This poor farmer is working in a tavern far from home because a drought ruined one of his harvests and that prevented him from paying rent, leading to his landlord seizing his farm and not even letting him stay on to work it. This happened up near Imazi. I suppose it's a universal constant that nobles are going to be pricks. We're absolutely going to have to swing by this farmer's home region further north before we finish the chapter, just in case there's anything we can do for him.   Leaving the tavern, I note that there are three bandits just hanging around in the streets of Balmestri, which seems off, so I circle around them to the sword store before I engage.    This guy has a few new items up for sale. Antara posted:Shadowmilk Long Swords are better in literally every way than short swords, so I buy one each for Kaelyn and William. It's a +10% better chance to hit, roughly, and an additional quarter extra damage with every hit that lands, so not a negligible boost by any measure. I have no idea why the cutlass is so much more expensive when it's a marginal improvement on the Short Sword and worse than the Long Sword. Now that we've got some new tools for murdering with, let's go murder some criminals.   Hm, just three pirates. Hope we didn't just stab some dudes who were waiting for the coach, maybe something's up with the house they were standing in front of?     Well, that's shady! Let's go canvas the village until we find the mayor and then put the fear of Kor into him.     If we attempt the fight the kid here, we get stopped before we murder any children, thankfully, and nothing happens. If we "surrender" instead, we gain Assessment which works a bit differently than in Krondor. Primarily in that it no longer requires wasting an action on it, you just right-click an enemy and, depending on skill and range, get some of their combat stats.  Alright, so maybe the mayor's not living on the outskirts, but next to the central square with its nice well instead?   So one thing that's different about dialogue from Krondor to Antara is that in Krondor, most dialogues had alternates for if you had completed their objectives already or had otherwise already gotten some sort of information relevant to them. For instance, on Timirianya, Dhatsavan would have different initial dialogue if we'd already found the Cup of Rlnn Skrr by the first time we talked to him. Here, on the other hand, the first dialogue always seems to play and then you get the second dialogue when you try to talk to them again immediately afterwards. It seems like a bit of an odd step back, writing-wise. Now if we visit him again...   Sadly we can't arrest him or stab him ourselves, so let's find someone who can.     As a better example of what I just said about first and second dialogues, we bump into these guys around the corner. Instead of telling them about Penwhite and the Mayor immediately, we instead get sent away and then if we come back, we get verbose.     There's no immediate reward to this other than a warm fuzzy sense that you helped ensure a prick is going to get their dick kicked in by a noble's footsoldiers. Still, we have a couple more places to visit, after all we have cows to save and Kaylen said she was headed here, so we may as well finish off her chore.    If we then haul the pelts out of Kaelyn's inventory and click them on his door, we get 35 coins for them. It's not huge, but it'll pay for a few rations. Lastly, we turn around a few corners to find Doc Myers.    This unlocks a reward if we go back to Briala, which we will, eventually. Not a huge one, but I have memories of this game being able to be exceptionally cruel at times, so I don't plan to take any risks. In any case, since we can't go any further south without ending up in the ocean, let's turn west towards Sortiga.  Unless any quest objectives suggest a better route, the plan is right now to hit towns in the order of Sortiga, Ligano, Imazi, Aliero, Midova, Panizo and probably a brief jaunt back to Briala to collect that reward from the farmer.   As I leave Balmestri I decide to take in the limited countryside a bit rather than immediately heading west down the road, as I do so, however, I spot something odd in the distance.   Unwittingly, a memory surfaces, and I remember these enemies creeping me the gently caress out as a kid.     They're not very scary, but they're just so gross! Make them go away! Thankfully the party's perfectly capable of just hitting them until they withdraw back under the ground. Brrrr.    For a while, it's just more pirates and bandits on the road west, nothing of any note. Beat them up, take their pocket money and fish and move onwards.     This thing is another temporary booster potion that gives an unspecified bonus to Lockpicking and Gambling. It'd be better if I knew when it was necessary to beat a trap or lock, but with the way the mechanics work and without a super-comprehensive data-mined FAQ, I just don't have any loving clue when it's useful and I'll probably just end up selling this.   This road has a lot of side paths, and only one or two of them don't have a reward, a fight or both at the end.   This one contains some new enemies! You'd be forgiven for thinking these guys are cave men or apes, but they're actually "Montari," a non-human species that we'll learn more about a bit later in the update. Mechanically they work the exact same as humans except that they tend to have less health than human enemies. Human enemies usually go down in about four swipes, Montari in three.   Also hot drat these guys were carrying some sweet loot! Upgraded shields for Kaelyn and William and a new tier of armor! Antara posted:Leather Armor Leather Armor is both harder to break and offers almost a third more protection than basic Leather Jerkins, while Small Shields offer about the same damage reduction as Wooden Shields but have about twice the Hardness and will thus offer said protection for longer.  And they're also guarding a chest! How much better could it g-   So, you might think: "Only a single busted sword? Putting a high-damage trap on that is just cruel!" Except the twist is that unlike in Krondor, where you could sometimes tank a high-tier trap to get a leg up in terms of gear or money, like on the first level of the Mac Mordain Cadal, in Antara if a chest blows up? It also blows up the contents. This, combined with a lack of comprehensive game info, also means that it's a lot harder to tell if it's worth your time to reload fifty times to try and break open one of these or if all that got blown up was a wheel of cheese and a wooden stick. Traps also seem to be universally rougher. In Krondor, most traps would generally stop at taking off about 3/4's of a starting party's health, with a few exceptions that would just completely krangle anything but the most hex-edited, busted-rear end party imaginable. Here, I've only run into a couple of traps so far, but they universally left everyone in the red and killed at least one party member into the Near-Death state.   These pirates are also guarding a trapped chest, but we're not visiting them just to watch me get blown up by a trap.  Despite the close quarters, three goddamn mages means I can't keep them all in check at once and they get off several spells, mostly just Unseeing Eye, but one of them also casts...   The absolutely saddest fireball I've ever seen, unfortunately it does a non-sad 30 points of damage, which is about twice as much as if one of the pirates had just whacked Kaelyn with their sword, which drops her and, once again, forces me to spend valuable Senwater since we just sent the only doctor in the region up to Briala.    Up here we get ambushed by yet more pirates, it's a perfectly standard fight except that by sheer luck, I noticed Aren actually learned a couple of new spells in time for this fight. Don't ask me how long ago he learned them, because the little "bwommm" sound that indicates he researched up his magic skills plays every so often and indicates nothing of interest, so I might've well missed it ages ago.  There's Unseeing Eye which we noted a while back, in lieu of real "gently caress you" spells like Grief from Krondor, it'll probably be my go-to if any single large enemies come at us.  Aaaaaaaaand Lightning Bolt which absolutely fucks and is my new go-to. Two casts of it will take down some enemies and others will need two casts and a light poke from one of the melee characters. This vastly simplifies combat and also gives Aren something useful to do on those first turns where I decide to have the party hang back and let enemies come to me.  Also it's weird to me how the spell effects in Antara simultaneously look more crisp and more primitive than in Krondor. In Krondor they tended to look like a blurry mess but they absolutely had more size and weight to them. A Flamecast was a fireball the size of someone's torso, etc.   About halfway between Balmestri and Sortiga, I notice a canyon running into the cliffs to the north and decide that it's probably worth taking a look at it.    Turns out there's another cave there! And fuuuuuuuuuuuck exploring this place. Like, in Krondor every indoor area, whether it was a cave, a mine or the dungeons of a fortress was composed of right angles which wasn't very verisimillitudinous, but meant that exploration was relatively simple and maps relatively easy to parse.  Look at this loving mess of a map. Half the time it doesn't map the wall of a corridor as I move through it, and do you see all those little off-shoot corridors it looks like I haven't bothered to explore?  They're these little "half" corridors that can't be entered and which a sane map would just parse as a wall! But nope, they gotta be on there to confuse the hell out of me! The encounters inside are, at least, relatively simple. A pair of Maslith groups and a pair of Carlith groups, the Masliths do unfortunately mean I gotta do some poison recovery afterwards, but it's a minor drain on my Senwater supplies. Plus there are, at least, a few boxes of loot in here.    Also none of them explode, they're only locked, thank God.   The red stone is a ruby, obviously just for selling, while the blue stone is a Sapphire Shieldstone. Shieldstones are temporary defenses against elemental damage types and exist in Sapphire(Cold), Ruby(Fire), Diamond(Electric) and Emerald(Poison) variants. Of course, for them to be useful you generally need to know when you're facing someone with the requisite type of elemental damage, and enemy mages sadly don't advertise what sort of bullshit they plan to pull. At least with poisonous creatures like Masliths the emerald version might be useful if I ever find any. The bottle is just wine, which, like getting drunk in Krondor, aids healing if you get sauced before resting at an inn. I suppose it's handy if you want to get your money's worth from it. Lastly there's a pickaxe which can in some caves, but none of the ones we've encountered so far, be used to mine gemstones out of the walls.   Now, considering that this is a labyrinthine dirthole full of poisonous lizards and unattended boxes full of gems, you might be excused for thinking that this is merely some sort of abandoned mine or videogame logic dungeon scorned by all right-thinking sapients, but no! There's actually someone down here! Just chilling next to a pack of aggressive Masliths!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wikIe-J97cQ Summary: The Montari we're seeing on the surface are out there raiding because they're desperate lower-cast Montari faced with starvation, said starvation is caused because some dickhead noble has diverted a major river to irrigate fields and fill his moat. Also all the masliths down here? Favored Montari food animals. Welcome to the Montari they're like... I don't know. Rat people? Gopher people? Someone help me out here. In any case I'm beating feet out of this maze. I was literally stuck in here for close to half an hour bumping off the walls and getting lost in the dark.   And then I decide to take a break because I'm still only slightly over halfway between Balmestri and Sortiga. It's hard to say if Antara is more content-dense than Krondor, but there's definitely a decent amount to do and at this rate it feels we'll be hitting about an update per town, not counting whatever re-visits and updates each chapter should happen to bless us with. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 05:26
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Vanigo posted:Shields aren't flat damage reduction, they have a flat chance to block attacks entirely. And IIRC, hardening fluid also raises the stats of the item you put it on for the next battle. With hardening fluid and Kor's blessing on the best armor in the game, you can get your damage reduction up to 95%. See what's really cool about all of this info is that as far as I can tell the manual doesn't tell me any of it. So with regards to the shield mechanics they may be right, or the sparsely-detailed "Betrayal Wiki" which covers both Antara and Krondor may be right. I also genuinely had no idea about the learning magic from watching enemy mages, I always just assumed new categories of spellcasting were opened up when the base Spellcasting skill got high enough.Vanigo posted:Speaking of spells, Scott should have given you a bundle of notes, which Aren can read to learn a couple more. Nothing especially exciting, though. I want to say detect traps and detect mineable resources? Ah, yeah, I did get the notes from Scott and use them to produce a spell that tells me I'm about to have to reload the game and a spell that I probably won't be able to use for hours of gameplay yet until I reach a cave that actually has mineable gems. And yes, the songs are fully voiced, though considering the bizarre decision to distribute them the around the game-world verse for verse rather than fully sung in one location... if anyone's interested I can try and staple together a listenable version by the time I get all the verses recorded. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 08:11
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kw0134 posted:Would you mind throwing in a quick summary of the conversations in the videos? Sure, I'll edit it into the existing posts and do it from now on.
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Dec 21, 2021 17:17
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Update 3: Still Avoiding The Plot So last we left off, we were about halfway between Balmestri and Sortiga. As I start up the game again and go over my stuff, I then notice a serious problem. I had been assuming that weapon maintenance was less "strict" in Antara than Krondor due to whetstones not being a common drop but instead a thing I've so far only found in two stores(Balmestri and Briala, and I won't have found them in any more stores by the end of this update). It turns out I'm super wrong and my swords are down to like 25% durability, which is why it's felt like they've been falling off damage-wise in the last couple of battles. My heading back to Balmestri is mostly off-screen except for one fun bug that happened on the way.   Antara lacks the very obvious "dang, we're heading south now, proceed?" and "dang, we're heading north now, proceed?" dialogue chunks that separate Krondor's world map into sectors, but it does have separate sectors that need to load in as you travel between them. Usually this just means some terrain looking a bit barren and then suddenly trees and stuff popping in but this time... the terrain didn't load. I must've found a hole in the triggers or something. I had to run back and forth a few times to make the north part of the coastline actually load in so I could, you know, go places.Once I get up there my swords are actually so busted that I replace them entirely and buy whetstones.    Along the way, I run into some pirates with a mage and decide to test out the "learning magic from watching enemies cast it"-thing.   With a bit of patience, I get this guy to cast Hotfoot at William. It's a direct-fire spell(i.e. it can miss) that does 3/4's of the damage of the lightning spell, at almost twice the casting cost. This makes it, in 90% of all cases, a worse option. The remaining 10% are when enemies aren't carrying swords(like animals or mages), or when the side-effect is useful. The side-effect it has is that when cast at max power(and when would you cast it at any other power tier?) it shifts the target to a random hex next to the one they start in. This can sometimes be used to buy a bit of space.  And whaddaya know, after the battle it turns out to be correct. This does change the uh, calculus of the game a bit in that for now, as long as enemy mages aren't mustering one-shot-kill stuff, I should obviously let them get off a spell or two before I aim for them and possibly leave them for last rather than going for them first. But imagine just coming to this game after Krondor and not knowing that, and thus screwing yourself out of so many magical unlocks by thinking you were a clever boy who always took out the wizards first.    Sortiga doesn't look awfully different from the other towns we've visited on the coast so far, but it has some new people to talk to and a new store to poke around in.         The first two houses introduce us to Sortiga's sidequest, where we're going to help someone get a wedding on the road, though, honestly, it doesn't particularly feel like a wedding I want to see happen. These guys sound kind of like assholes. Before I find the third house in town related to this quest, though, I stumble into the local shop.   It has a few new items we haven't seen. The drums are Antara's version of the Tuning Fork from Krondor, but for worms instead of trolls and you can't just go ahead and use it, you need to find an NPC who teaches you the trick. The Fidali Leaves can be mixed with the otherwise largely useless Ale bottles every second enemy carries to produce Fidali Paste which is a counter-venom item that cures about 50% poison per use as far as I can tell. I'm also not sure if anything in the game ever quite tells you this, and it doesn't seem like Fidali Leaves have any use by themselves. Lastly there are the Nudberries, which I can find absolutely zero information about anywhere. I'm not sure if they have any use or what. They do look nice, though, their flavour text informs us they're a crop pest, but I'd taste one. I end up buying enough Fidali Leaves for a full stack of Fidali Paste(bizarrely the Paste stacks top out at 10 while both ale and leaves stack up to 12, an odd and annoying choice).     Around the corner we meet the last of the NPC's relevant to the town's quest. This idiot mislaid the wedding rings and, of course, we can save his rear end. The only hint is that he hid them "near the coast."   Out near the coast there are no obvious containers, no chests or big mounds of stone to dig through.   After walking back and forth a few times, I finally spot this little bump on the beach. It's supremely hard to see unless you're almost right on top of it, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'd missed a couple of these along the coastline in other places.  I was wondering if this was a unique tradition to Antara or if it's something people do/did in the real world, too. I've never heard of rings for your firstborn kids. Anyway, let's see if the blond fella is thankful for this.    He doesn't seem too chuffed about it, but he still gives us a reward. It's a book that gives +5 Scouting to whoever reads it. Unlike in Krondor, books can only be read once by each character, rather than one guaranteed bonus and then a bunch of gacha rolls for more skill boosts. The way it works here it feels a bit like he might as well just have given us a +5 Scouting bonus as a reward for completing the quest rather than wasting our time. Time to head back a bit east and then north to Ligano.     The road is, as per the older man in Sortiga, absolutely clogged with starving and angry Montari which we have no option but to kill. It's kind of a shame that, despite knowing what the problem is, we can't just pass them some rations and go on our way. I'll also note that so far, despite like... I wanna say 30+ fights, I've succeeded at all of one attempted ambushes. They are definitely a lot harder to manage than in Krondor, though not having any real access to a Weed Walker equivalent so far probably isn't helping. The semi-unintended route I took in Betrayal at Krondor got the party equipped with nice ambush shoes pretty early on, almost certainly earlier than the game was balanced for.  In this particular fight, the Montari mage uses a new spell, Tortoise Bind, on Aren. It seems as far as I can tell to be a strictly worse version of Unseeing Eye. Unlike Unseeing Eye it doesn't lower the target's accuracy, and instead trades that in for lowering their initiative. Since as far as I can tell all characters and enemies always get their one action per round, I'd rather make that action have a bigger chance of missing than making it come later.   It turns out they were guarding another code chest, and unlike the first one, this one I figure out relatively quickly. E-ME-RA-L-D Sadly all it contains is a stack of rations, nothing I'll turn down but I feel like chests so far are generally more of a letdown.    So far it's also worth noting that except for one stack of rocks and the sand lump on the beach, literally every lootable interactible(rocks, chests, etc.) we've found have been at the end of a path of some sort, never just in the wilds. This is a stark contrast to Krondor where almost every such object was, in fact, just hidden behind a hill, or behind some random trees, usually never hinted at by a path. So when I get here, about halfway between Sortiga and Ligano, the road suddenly widens up and there's a big woody dip in to the right, I instantly think: "hell yeah! gotta be some sweet swag hidden in here!" and dive off the road to check it out.   And then when I'm almost at the treeline, something very loving odd happens.  Suddenly every single tree is a different type! Like I've entered another kind of biome!  And the world behind me has disappeared!    I walk around for a while and find absolutely nothing. I note that there's a reference to a busted "gully" south of Ligano on some forum posts, apparently an issue with the GOG version that doesn't exist with the original has bugged out an area near Ligano to not contain a temple to Henne that it normally would, due to game files on the game's two CD's having the same names and the devs not being sure how to make it call the right one. As far as I know this one may yet be unfixed and... maybe this is it? Maybe the bug is loving up this place and making it not have a temple it normally would? I'm genuinely unsure. Maybe it's relevant later in the game.    Back on the road I'm soon right by Ligano.    The only notable incident on the road is that the gang has gotten good enough with melee that I've taken them off mainly using Thrust attacks and on to using Swing attacks instead, which gives them on average +5 damage. It might not sound like a lot, but considering that William and Kaelyn were doing about 25 damage before, the upgrade to ~30 damage is still about +20%.  Ligano, like every other town in the game, has a stock of colourful NPC's who'll talk to us, but probably the least of any of the towns we've been in so far.   I'm not sure whether this is a result of us killing every group of Montari on the road to the south or whether we always get this dialogue on arrival.    I later learn that this was supposed to be a subtle hint that using some food on the house, i.e. giving it to Kalyx, would make him offer us some training(+5 Defense across the party). This is one place where I feel like Antara is a definite downgrade from Krondor, its handling of encounters like this. In Krondor, we would've terminated the conversation on a yes/no prompt to giving him some food, making it absolutely clear how much food would be given and that it was an option at all. In Antara it's all so much more vague, and there's never any tutorial element to make you keep an eye out for things like this, nor is it ever common enough to keep you on your toes for NPC's looking for inventory objects. Aside from Kalyx and Rosie, the town also has an inn with no NPC's and two other houses to poke at.    And lastly a store.    This one has a lot of exotic stuff. Yelloweye is a nightvision potion, not sure why it would ever be superior to using torches which are much cheaper, maybe having no torches lit increases ambush chances underground or at night? Halder's Brew is a strength booster, I don't know what "An Optics Primer" does since of course it's the only book on the wiki without its effects described, but I would assume it boosts Assessment or Archery. Rings of the Ranger passively increase Scouting. Dervish Disks... I have absolutely no idea about because once again no one on the internet appears to have noted what they're good for. It's not on the wiki, it's in no FAQ's, so it's a complete and utter mystery. From memory I think they're used to cast a powerful spell once, but if that's the case then their cost is completely insane unless it's a "win any battle"-spell. If I find one or eventually get a huge money surplus to buy one with, I'll test one out and report back. loving mystery-rear end game.   On the east side of Ligano is this little gap in the rocks which is INCREDIBLY annoying to navigate because, like in Krondor, you "bounce" off walls you hit at anything less than a completely 90-degree angle, but unlike in Krondor walls are no longer neat, straight geometric lines and instead have more realistic and organic shapes which means that moving down one of these narrow crevices, or narrow cave corridors, feels distinctly like being a pinball.    It does look rather pleasant, though, even if there's nothing at the end. Probably the place will be relevant in a later chapter or quest... or maybe this is where there was meant to be a temple which was bugged out of existence. The supposed temporary "fix" for said non-existent temple involves deleting a game file before approaching it, then placing it back again after leaving the area. For a game as janky and unstable as Antara, I think I'd rather not provoke it to wig out any more on me than it already does.   A short distance northeast of Ligano a bunch of Montari are menacing some vague, coloured blobs on the road.  As usual it goes extremely poorly for the Montari, after which I step in to see what the vague blobs want. It turns out they're Senaedrin nuns.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lAU-22u4L8 The janky part about this conversation is that the sisters want more food than is in a single stack, but because, once again, handing people stuff can't just be part of a dialogue, you have to hand stuff over and have a dialogue for it twice, with the first one resulting in nothing. In addition to healing us when we first talk with them, and the reward for handing them the rations, this now makes them warp to Aspreza where they'll spend the time between chapter 1 and chapter 2 helping with the Feeblepox outbreak. This means that somewhat more NPC's will be alive there if we visit again in later chapters, meaning some more dialogue and a few rewards as well. Also, of course, despite the dialogue there's no time limit on actually reaching the Sisters here and helping them out. They'll wait till doomsday(or at least the start of chapter 2) before despawning. Having done this, I then promptly turn around and head westwards away from Ligano instead, intending to reach the western limit of how far we can explore before looping north to Midova.      As far as I'm aware, Poolkeep is nowhere in the explorable gameworld, nor is it mentioned anywhere. However, the answer is nonetheless possible to figure out... M-ON-TA-R-I Either by simply seeing it's an option or recalling that we've only met one group of expert burrowers so far.  This time, at least, the reward is more worth it. That's a very nice sapphire. However, I'll note that even by the end of this update, I've yet to find a drat store that buys gems. I managed to offload the brooches found farther down south in Ligano, but, and I feel like I'm saying this a lot, unlike in Krondor, Antara shops tend to be far more specialized both in what they sell and what they buy.     With mages being less threatening(at least so far), combat in Antara is(at least so far), notably less interesting. I'm skipping over most encounters that don't introduce anything new or kick my rear end as a result. You'd think that the zones of control would spice them up, but seeing as how each character can only "control" one hex immediately in front of them, you can't control facing(or even which hex an enemy is attacked from, the nearest is always picked even if there are multiple options) and the zone "only" prevents casting, archery and moving straight through, rather than, say, provoking attacks of opportunity, they don't actually spice things up that much. If the ZoC could be "guarded" and facing could be chosen, it would quickly become viable to have Kaelyn and William run interference for Aren while he chucked out spells. Combined with some sort of obstructions on the battlefield you could actually make tactical decisions or bottle enemies up. I have vague memories of battle maps with obstructions, but since it's close to 20 years since I last played this, that may well just be a flaw of my memory.   Almost as soon as the road from Ligano meets the north/south road from Panizo to Midova, there's a cleft in the cliffs to the west.    It opens up to this nice-looking foresty meadowy area, but if we attempt to cross the bridge, William pours cold water on our fun.  Dickhead. Doesn't seem to stop us making a detour every time we're almost there. I said I need to, not that I want to. We're taking every excuse we can to put it off. Really? I've always wanted to see the mines in Aliero...   We're headed for Imazi anyway, so it's not much of a detour. Oh, I'm sure you're deeply concerned about lord whats-his-face in Imazi. I'd be lax in my filial duties if I didn't keep an eye on worrisome rumours near my father's estate.  See that huge square lump up there? That's Midova.   Krondor solved the issues of "towns too big to explain away as five houses by the roadside" by letting you approach their invisible outskirts, and then hoovering you in to a hand-drawn screen displaying the glory of the local area and often looking quite nice. For Antara they for some reason did not simply tuck these towns away inside the omnipresent cliffs or after a lot of fields or something else that would let them warp you in from a distance. Instead they just encased them in these big protective cubes which look hilariously bad.    Like, alright, fair if you're going to wall them in. But then at least give them like... some guard towers or a gatehouse or something. Before ducking into the city, I check out a hole in the cliff across from the gates.     All it contains is this scroll which is a quest item for a quest which we can't access for, I think, another two chapters. We also can't read it or anything, we just have to remember the family name and keep an eye out for when it pops up. Anyway, Midova!  The cube cities get little subscreens like this, it looks nice enough but it feels like a step down from Krondor's sweeping pieces of almost-painterly art.   The only thing of notice in the inn is that it has a single-verse drinking song. I do like it, though.   Two of the five buildings are also inaccessible at the moment, but I think both of them become relevant as part of the main plot as the game advances.  The local store is an armor store, but it sells nothing we haven't seen before, just leather jerkins, leather armors, rope and drums. The great thing about it, though, is that it lets us sell all the leather armors we've been picking up from the Montari along the way and they sell for FAT loads. The party gets close to 1000 Burlas once I'm done going back and sweeping the roads for more sellables.  The last building, the big one up north, is a market, which actually has four people to interact with: the nearest stall on the right, the middle stall on the right, the alley in the back and the nearest NPC on the screen(listed in that order because that's the order I interact with them in).    The first two are just fluff, this one is a sweets seller who tells us that the Montari apparently make the best chocolate in the Empire. Odd, not what I'd usually associate with mole people. But sure.  The next one is a vegetable merchant, and "please do not wave my carrot disdainfully" will never stop being funny to me.    The guy in the back tempts us with a "magical bracelet," and while it seems SUPER shady, I can't remember if it's bullshit or not so I click yes since it's pretty cheap...  All it gives us is a low-quality piece of jewelry. I'm like 90% sure it won't recover our losses if we sell it, but that it is something sellable makes the financial sting a lot less bad.     Lastly, the guy nearest the screen is the guy who teaches us how to use drums to scare off Field Worms. Seeing as how Field Worms drop nothing and only serve to waste our weapon durability and my patience, this seems like a win to me and is really the main reason(aside from selling armor) to come to Midova at this point, since there are no quests that start or terminate here for the time being.  Next stop: Aliero, Imazi and then at long last Panizo. But that's for the next update.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:46
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Update 4: Just the Absolute Worst Resuming the game, we're headed eastwards out of Midova to Aliero, and usefully enough, the first thing we see as we look down the road is a pack of worms. Let's test out how well the drums work on them.    The answer is that they work...  A bit jankily. In Krondor, you used the tuning fork and all trolls would bail for the edge of the battlefield to retreat as soon as their turn rolled around. In Antara, it seems to reliably make 3 out of 4 worms(all the groups I tested on were 4-worm groups) flee instantly, but the fourth worm would hang around doing nothing for multiple turns. In one case I lost my patience and just killed it, and it never fought back, and in the other cases they seemed to sit around for three to four turns before also instantly running away. It raises some questions about Antara's morale mechanics which are very hard to parse. In Krondor you only had enemies run away when their own health was quite low, in Antara it also seems to be tied to how well their whole group is doing, as sometimes killing one or two enemies will make a completely "intact" enemy start legging it. Anyway, this means that I largely won't have to waste my time killing these particular enemies without loot from now on, so it's back to travel.    I think Aliero is meant to be a mountain-y sort of town, the game simulates this by giving the terrain leading up towards it stair steps to indicate that it's rising, because Antara's engine can handle height differences, but not gradual slopes. Which is honestly a bit odd since it seems to be a direct descendant of Krondor's engine, and Krondor's engine could at least handle the slight sloping that happened at the start and end of every bridge in the game.    Now, there's Aliero, but before Aliero... there's a cave! And caves are always interesting.   This one is a, and possibly the only, I can't quite recall, mine-style cave in Antara, and thank God for that. 90% of it is nice, regular square corridors where I don't bounce off the geometry all the time.   Several of the intersections are these more natural-looking caves, but they're not too complicated and the worst enemies they occasionally hold are some Masliths and Carliths, which aren't much of a threat, especially now that I have Fidali Paste to neutralize even large poison scores.    The cool thing here is that this room has something special besides the little pond! Can you see it? I sure loving can't.  Even with the "find hidden minerals"-spell up, the deposits are only visible by being slightly brighter sections of the wall.  They either produce just plain money or decent-quality gems, but whether we get anything at all(though not, I think, the volume/quality) is down to our Foraging skill. This means that I actually end up burning through my three pickaxes down here when one high-difficulty(or just cursed-RNG) deposit melts through two full ones without yielding anything.   A couple of places the mine corridors are also intersected by these rift-looking cave structures. Somewhere in the background lore is a mention of an ancient chamber in these mine containing technological artifacts from a non-magical forerunner civilization, but there's no sign of anything like that here. It's always disappointing when the writing hints at stuff like that, and then you can't poke at any of it.    And, you know, sometimes this game can actually look perfectly fine! Good, even! This little cave lake with the stepping stone bridge feels like a neat place to come across. All it's really lacking is a few nice stalactites or something to really "sell" it as a cool cave.    Aside from the gems and a few nice things to look at, though, there's nothing important in the Aliero Mines, so now we can pop over to the town itself.    The structures up here are a bit different from the ones down in the south, more bricky while the ones down south were... more non-bricky? I don't quite know the term. But it's nice that it's not just the same house model reproduced across the entire world map.   Also one of the houses here contains some free pies. Sure, just go ahead and yank those cold pies out of an abandoned house and eat them, you loving slobs. Can't hear you over how much pie we've got.The house behind it...    I feel like we had something like this exact convo with a random farmer in Krondor.  Leaving that house, I discover a puzzle chest chilling in the plants behind the town.  So if you aren't thinking, you'll spell out SENAEDRIN here, and be puzzled that it won't work. However...  The answer is actually D-EN-N-A if you read the description on a bottle of Senwater.   The reward being a book that boosts the reader's Foraging skill. I could've used that before I hit the mine.    Appropriately enough the sole store in town sells mostly mining supplies and also finally buys our gems. Between the various pearls and stuff the party's picked up from chests and the stuff from the mine, it's about 400 Burlas which isn't bad at all. The only novel item here is Beeswax which repairs bows.  There's also a new tavern, and what I will absolutely congratulate Antara for is that every tavern and store has a different image, unlike in Krondor where there were three or four of each that got repeated over and over. We also have an NPC we can talk to here.      Poor guy. At least he had someone to listen to his woes, though.   And the last house at the edge of town fills it out. Aliero has had it rough.    Heading east out of Aliero towards Imazi, it starts to become obvious that taking the northern route must've been what the devs intended, despite Kaelyn pointing you towards Balmestri. Every encounter up here is against smaller groups and no mages.    On the south side of the narrow pass are a few narrow canyons with some enemies and a bit of loot in them. The only thing of notice is that one of the loot chests there is a code chest.  T-RI-UN-E The name for the three deities of Antara as a whole.  Not a big score, but still nice.   On the north side of the pass is this ledge which starts high up near Aliero and then drops in height towards the middle of the pass where it's just as low as the "steps" up to Aliero, but despite being so low it's still just treated as a wall which offends my brain slightly.    As soon as we're out of the pass to Aliero, we're right on top of Imazi, which looks more like the towns we've visited so far.      Oh, yeah, Imazi is where some dickhead noble was repossessing people's farms due to bad crop yields! Sounds like an absolute rear end in a top hat. I wonder what other sort of damage he's doing to this place.    Something a bit odd about this river, too...   Ha ha, oh yeah, he's responsible for the starving and aggressive Montari, too, due to damming up the river for his loving moat.      William is just the apex of good taste in jokes.      Oh and he's also taking bribes and pressuring local craftsmen. Sounds like he is, in fact, a greedy prick.    The store here has one new thing of importance, which is a weapon upgrade for Aren at long last. Very nice. I also take the chance to swap out William and Kaelyn's swords again. I'm not sure whether it's a consequence of their low maintenance skills or still being relatively early days in weapon hardiness, but it feels like it's consistently impossible for them to keep them well-repaired and they need swapping out for entirely new ones sooner or later.    Maybe we should have a talk with "Lord Garsson" and see what he's got to say for himself... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQZ2AAoAMbs It appears that what he has to say for himself is unending justifications for being an abusive shithead. We can't do anything about it... for now. Antara seems to have a generally more jaundiced view of nobles than Krondor does, which includes their often being assholes and also includes their feeling the consequences of being assholes.    Heading east out of Imazi we're really just on the road to Briala again, where there's nothing new for us, but along the way I do run into this very long fence.    It leads to a very large farm that I can't find a way to interact with, possibly it's something that becomes relevant in later chapters or maybe it's just set dressing. I couldn't find any mentions of anything to do here. So, with the visitable area fully explored, I decide to head off and do a bit of cleanup, which is mostly me dragging large amounts of spare Leather Armors to Midova where they sell for about 120 gold a piece before heading down to Panizo so William will finally have to deal with his family again.    Like Midova, Panizo is a Cube City, but without brick walls.  The large structure at the top is obviously the Escobar Estate, and interacting with it ends the chapter, so let's visit the three other buildings first.   There's an armor merchant which sells a nice armor upgrade, Chainmail, better in literally every way than Leather Armor. It's also worth noting there here you get a mere 22 gold for sold Leather Armors, which is less than 20% of what you get for them in Midova. Another item of note is the Oil, which is like Naphtha from Krondor in that it gives your sword extra damage for a battle.   I also like how just a change of armor suddenly makes Kaelyn and William not look like dorks wearing rags and instead like actual soldiers or mercenaries.  Another bulding is, of course, an inn, where we can talk to the barmaid.    I'm not even sure what to really say about this whole interaction. It makes William seem like kind of a dick because maybe he shouldn't be fooling around with this girl when he's got a marriage incoming, even if it's likely a political one.   And the last building is a very underwhelming bookstore. The only new thing it has is, well.   A book about lizard sex that makes characters better at gambling. I have no idea how the gambling works in Antara, some inns have a single guy who wants to play cards with you, and my experience with gambling in these games is that it's either A) a complete and utter money sink(like real gambling) or B) you've found a glitch in the system and it generates infinite money. As I have yet to find a glitch, I won't be wasting the party's money on this. On the gambling, that is, I still get the book for completion's sake. Then turn around and sell it right back to the guy because unlike in Krondor using a skill-boosting item consumes nothing from it. That's all there is to do in Panizo, though, time to watch the cutscene for ending the chapter... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVpMk-oL2g I feel like what's really missing in Antara, personally, is the like... stakes. If we really care about the characters, then personal stakes like "William has dad problems" and "Aren wants to become a wizard" are fuel enough. But... man, maybe it takes time, but I just don't care that much about these characters so far. Krondor plays it much safer there, having a threat to the entire Kingdom pop up from the very first cutscene, pretty much. Still, it sounds like in chapter 2 we'll at least be dealing with a wizard and then some court drama.
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Jan 7, 2022 08:13
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I do hope people stick with the LP, though, because as I recall it, Antara does have some cool stuff that pops up from... I wanna say about the end of chapter 2 onwards. Especially chapter 6 has some things that I know people are going to love.
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Jan 8, 2022 02:10
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sb hermit posted:I spent a lot of time in Betrayal at Krondor trying to make money by having Owyn play the lute. I loved to spend hours in that universe, but then my savefile got corrupted and I gave up. Those first three characters were so cool to a teenage me. Keep in mind that I have never read a book set in Midkemia, much less any book by Feist (I was more of a Stephen King fan back then). Oh, no, it's absolutely a worthwhile thing to talk about, i.e. what's boned about the game and what's needed to unbone it. It'll probably require us getting a bit more into the "meat" of the game so we know how much of the start is skippable. Psion posted:Oh, yeah, I'm here for it. Now if you'll just sign this blood pact promising me interesting things in chapter 2-6... Well, trust me, if nothing else, I realized I had to reload a bit to go back for some missed content in chapter 1, and it will definitely get you some interesting voice acting, if that counts.
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Jan 8, 2022 04:50
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Expect more than the usual amount of swearing for the upcoming update. I simply can't believe the amount of drudge work and psychic deduction the developers expected of the players for this loving sidequest.
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Jan 10, 2022 02:31
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Update 5: Why Would They Do This? So to prepare for tackling chapter 2, I looked up the sidequests for the chapter in a sparse FAQ to try and plot out a sort of optimal course, whether there was anything I would need to pick up early to show something off later without needing to spend like an extra hour of playtime backtracking for a loving bucket or a piece of rope or a nudberry or something. While doing so, I found out that I actually missed a sidequest in chapter 1! Now, remember that farmer working at the tavern in Balmestri? The guy whose farm Lord Garsson had repossessed? We can actually help him in chapter 1. If you can't figure out how the gently caress we do that, congratulations, you're a normal human being. If you have in any way intuited a solution, or felt one was hinted at, then I believe the CIA is interested in you for their ESP program. For the rest of us, this will all be coming as a surprise.   So first, we're returning to Sortiga, the town between Balmestri and Panizo. I believe I skipped over the inn last time, but I'll be recapping the contents there this time, because they're, I guess, kind of relevant?       We've got this bunch of jackass locals laughing about how they mistreated some old lady, which just seems like one of the many aside content bits present in Antara which don't tie into anything. I, certainly, never realized it tied into anything! Now, let's hop outside...   Walk past a couple of houses and go off the road into this narrow area between Sortiga and a chunk of impenetrable woods and...  When we turn right, there's this super easily missed NPC hanging out next to the trees! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24eFiQApTVA Her voice acting is... unique. Especially around 3:45 where she manages to put more syllables into the vocalization "hmmmph!" than most people manage to put into entire sentences. The long of the short is that Lord Garsson paid this old lady to curse the farmer's farm so he could steal it, and then handed her evidence that he'd worked with her, which is what clever criminals do. We then promptly buy the scarf off her for 250 Burlas(I think you can get away with just 125 or 150, but the interface is kind of wonky and has poor responsiveness on that) and hoof it northwards to Imazi since we now have something to piss off Garsson with.  The smoking gun! Or handkerchief, as it may be. Along the way I also stop off in Ligano to pass some rations to Sgt. Kalyx so we can get his dialogue(and his stat boost...).      The writers for Antara were definitely fond of puns. Even if many of them are a bit too pained even for me.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13J_0tTK4Jg So we confront Garsson with the evidence and he eventually caves and... gives us nothing. See, this is because you need to ask him the question without evidence and THEN present him with the evidence, or it doesn't work and actually give you the Deed item you need to hand to Farmer Mattia. This confused the hell out of me since I didn't realize I was meant to be given a quest item the first time around, hopped off to Balmestri(which was like a five-minute walk), had to pop out and check a FAQ and try to figure it out, realized I needed an item, hopped back to Garsson, went through the dialogues again, etc. and then back down to Balmestri. All in all that sequence alone took like 20 minutes, and that was with the roads completely cleared by earlier travels, since none of the game's limited fast travel speeds things up any, and there's a huge cliff formation blocking off a direct path between Imazi and Balmestri, so you have to take the long walk around. It sucks!  Done right, though, this is the item we get as a result. Now it's just a matter of giving to the farmer which... turned out to be slightly more challenging than I initially expected.    So far the way I've given items to NPC's at all points in the past, which has worked, has been to go to a character's inventory, drag out the item, and then use it on the NPC's house door or their overworld sprite, which has both started the conversation with them and given them the item. I can drag the Deed item out inside the Inn screen, but dropping it on top of the farmer's sprite does nothing. It turns out that for NPC's that are on a sub-screen, what you need to do is instead start a conversation with them, THEN enter the character's inventory and drag the item on to their icon. This probably works for all the others, too, but since it's a mechanic that the game never deigns to explain to us, how the hell would anyone figure it out except by experimentation? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTFpgjLdgM The immediate reward, other than doing something nice and spiting a dickhead, is that Brunia gives us a random assortment of bottles which turn out to be potions.  An archery booster.  A spellcasting accuracy booster.  And a strength booster. All temporary, of course. They're somewhat more useful than in Krondor because using potions from a character's inventory doesn't consume their turn, so you can actually bust them out in an emergency rather than needing to predict which battles will kick your rear end before they happen. At the same time it also unbalances the gameplay a bit because a sufficient stash of Senwater now allows you to power through most situations unless something can kill or incapacitate a given character in a single round before they get an action. No reason to be satisfied with just helping the man and getting his thanks, though, let's trek up to Imazi, again, and see how he's doing.     No eviction notice on his door any longer, that's a nice change.   And the man himself has replaced the two burly thugs who were keeping folks out on Lord Garsson's orders earlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTZSv5fvXQ So first his farm was cursed, then it was repossessed, and now it's haunted. This poor guy. Let's see if we can help him again, shoulder past him and poke around his field some.   There's something sticking out of the ground up ahead, but we can't even get near it as we are now. Now, I'll leave everyone to consider how this situation is resolved. Perhaps we need to find a calming drug? Or find some sort of counterspell? Talk to the old crone from earlier and get her to come banish the evil spirits? Ha ha, no, we have to exit the game and edit the game files. After heading down to Ligano first, of course.   Remember this cleft which, earlier, just lead to a small clearing with a few trees in it? And remember how I mentioned there was a bugged area near Ligano that required editing game files to unbug? This is it. I have to quit out of the game while in Ligano, delete or rename(ideally rename since I'll need them back later) two game files and then pop back in. Now when I go into the cleft...   There's a loving temple here! After leaving, I have to undo the changes I made, for some reason, I'm not sure what happens if I don't, but I imagine the consequences are undesired.  Looks nice enough inside, though. There are two priests to talk to here, let's get the farthest one first.    As far as I can tell, informing this guy that he can go sort out the wedding is just a fluff thing and has no actual gameplay or gameworld effects. The other priest...     Offers us this super-vague blessing that no wiki or FAQ explains what does, exactly. What it most certainly does not, based on the description, is protect us from ghosts or terror. It does not, I repeat, protect us from ghosts or terror. It does not. Ha ha just kidding this loving vague-rear end thing totally does for completely unclear loving reasons. Once again props to the psychic ubermensch who were able to deduce this, because I sure as gently caress would never have.     And just like that, boop, the fields are now passable. The farmer has no response to us doing this, which is a bit of a shame, but we do gain the staff as an item.  The Staff of Nightmares is a worse melee weapon than any non-magical staff. The other magical staves in the game are also pretty bad, all being between the starter Wooden Staff and Quarterstaff in strength. What's special is that if any of them are used for a Thrust attack, they instead deliver their magical payload. In case of the Staff of Nightmares, it makes an enemy instantly attempt to flee. This is absolutely terrible, since it means we can't kill them and take their stuff. It might be a decent in-a-pinch way of getting a single enemy out of the way, but looting enemies is incredibly vital since it's our main source of income.  We can now also continue past the farm, though there's no real reason to do so yet, but that's rarely stopped me. Behind the farm is an empty cave which we can't interact with for a bit yet.     Does certainly look somewhat neat, right? Looks kind of like someone broke into an existing underground structure.   Now I can head back to Panizo and finish the chapter. On the way, though, I decide to take the road from Imazi to Midova that skips Aliero, and which has its own little canyon network on its south side much like the northern one does. Most of the trip is unremarkable except for one nice-looking location.   This little hidden lake shows once again that the engine CAN do nice locations and the developers knew how to do it when they had the time or wanted to invest the effort. The chest is a code chest...  F-I-DA-LI It contains a stash of money and Senwater, both of which are welcome. Anyway, time to head down to Panizo and end the chapter... Again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVpMk-oL2g  After the cutscene we're unceremoniously dumped on the doorstep of Panizo with the quest of finding "mage Finch" who's got a hiding spot north of Midova. This obviously makes Midova our first port of call but, eh, since when did we ever go where the game wanted us to go? It's not the boss of us. Mostly I want to check up on Imazi to see if there are any new quests or dialogue over there relating Lord Garsson and our chances for ruining his day.    Most areas appear to have been repopulated with fresh batches of enemies, though not quite as many as the full complement present in chapter 1(thank God), and often a bit weaker. All of the ones I encounter in the Panizo/Midova/Ligano/Imazi rectangle are either packs of mage-less bandits or field worms, for instance. No montari and their wizards or other things that could present a potential actual threat.     There's nothing new in Ligano, as far as I can tell it doesn't update for the rest of the game and can thus be safely ignored unless we happen to need an inn to pass through, but Imazi does have some new dialogue from the residents. Nothing from Farmer Mattia yet, though, I later learn that while he doesn't by default have any new dialogue, now if you go poke around his farm's cave and clear out some newly spawned enemies inside, it'll have an effect. It'll be something to remember for a future update, though, since I didn't learn about that obscure trigger until after I was done recording. As for the other residents, let's start out in the inn.   Yep, it's the rear end in a top hat in the hat again. More or less every chapter, Scott will warp to a new inn somewhere to sit around getting drunk and be ready to voice act at us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZOLXY6f99w I guess Scott isn't the worst NPC in the history of NPC's but I also feel like the writers over-estimated how charming he would be. Thankfully there are other people to talk to outside.     Like this poor rear end in a top hat who got extremely predictably scammed by Lord Garsson, whoops.   And this guy who's now literally out of business. If we find a pack of skins somewhere, he can make us a free drum, and I guess there's no reason to turn down a free drum.  Three houses that were empty in chapter 1 are now populated in chapter 2 and all of them have a good deal of dialogue.    Pending... resurrection?       So, okay, these bits of dialogue are pretty amusing(and I did buy the insurance policy since it actually has an in-game effect much later), but it feels a bit out of place that in a setting where we have folks recently mourning their permanently departed spouses or other family members, there's supposedly common-enough magical/divine resurrection that insurance policies need to take it into account. Now don't get me wrong, I think that would make for a hilarious and interesting fantasy setting, if you went hard on it. But it feels like it's not Antara. Anyway, time for the last guy here. As a rare thing, this is something I feel requires a brief content warning for mentions of sexual violence. Nothing egregrious in the grand scheme of things, but I know some folks would probably rather skip over it.    gently caress Lord Garsson. Keep this little sidestory in mind, though, as it will actually have a resolution... when we're about another 50% thorugh the game, admittedly, but I'm sure some of you will enjoy it anyway. We can go talk to Garsson still, but there's no new dialogue, not even an option to punch him in his fat loving face and then leg it, so now we're heading on to Midova to find Finch and teach Aren some Real True Magic(tm) unlike all the piddly lightning-calling he's done so far. Being in chapter 2, this also lifts some spell-learning/skill-training limits which means Aren picks up another couple of spells on his own while taking the walk to Midova. The two spells he picks up are Web(creates a randomly-shaped area where anyone moving in or out of any of the affected hexes must spend their entire turn doing so, this could have some actual tactical use at times) and Moonless Night(target hex and all adjacent hexes are affected by a darkness effect, anyone under it has increased defense and worsened offensive stats, almost halving them. could be useful for buying time, I guess?). In most cases, just blasting enemies with damage will largely win out, however. It's also worth noting that on the road between Imazi and Aliero there's a pile of rocks you can tip over, which contains the only spare pack of skins in the game(the same item that Kaelyn starts with, in fact. you could probably just keep that and bring it to Imazi instead. the 35 Burlas for bringing it to the guy in Balmestri is some real pocket change).     Before we poke around for Finch, I'll just stick my head inside Midova to see if anything should have happened to have changed there.   Looks like a new guy in the inn, and it thankfully isn't Scott! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHOqowz47Is I'm sure that this guy getting jumped and getting his rear end kicked by a bunch of racist nobles is completely unrelated to anything. Aside from that, the two previously sealed houses in Midova are now accessible.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1dQxqGHXNc At the moment there are no dialogue options for this guy, but that'll eventually change. For now it's just a nice unassuming store that sells nice things which we can't buy because Aren isn't allowed to have nice things. Let's check out the other one.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xpsdqMlBa8 This guy is pretty blatantly shady, but thankfully he isn't our problem since William is actually smart enough not to borrow money from someone who'll try to break his legs if he doesn't pay up on time. In any case, it's clear that Mage Finch isn't inside Midova, so we'll take a look outside and just to the north.    I love that the mighty HIGH MAGE FINCH is just a chubby guy in a bathrobe wandering around barefoot in the dirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYOSebEQLhw I swear there's no such thing as an even vaguely normal voiced NPC in this game. Welp, good thing we just met someone who can help us get rare foodstuffs!     A nice and simple convo, but he isn't lying. We're going to have to pop outside and sleep in a ditch for a week before things update. I sure hope Finch wasn't expecting that tea any time soon.   Why aren't we sleeping inside Midova? There's a town right there! It has an inn! Look, you're perfectly healthy, there's no reason to spend money on an inn when that's the case. This nice ditch has even got comfy moss in it. If I get some sort of horrible disease from this, you guys better pay up for the healing.After about a week of brushing ticks off Aren every morning, we then wander back inside...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-Jatin0AvA Oh no, turns out someone flipped Paolo's store AND stole our tea, the huge dickheads. Well, let's go see the biggest dickhead in town and see what he has to say for himself.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfuMgyJw5KQ At least he owns up to it, but now we've gotta haul rear end all the way down to Sortiga and probably beat some wizard over the head until he pays up. I really hope Finch wasn't expecting that tea any time soon. On the bright side maybe he was just saying it to get rid of us and the longer we take, the happier he'll be.  I haven't blown myself up yet. I'm sure it'll be fine.Next time: Tea! Clearing out Farmer Brunai's cave! Maybe visiting Briala again if I feel like taking the long way! PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 20:54
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Hel posted:Was there supposed to be a cutscene introducing chapter 2 here? Sorry, that was actually at the end of the last post, I should probably have edited it in so it's in both posts.
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Jan 11, 2022 21:40
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You know on recording the latest update, I'm starting to consider that perhaps voice-acting for Antara was part of why the game flopped. Unironically even bits of dialogue that would be workable if not good without voice-acting are regularly turned into raw comedy by this loving game.
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Jan 12, 2022 02:13
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MagusofStars posted:Also, what's people's take on the new word lock chests? I like the concept, but it seems like a lot of the ones thus far have revolved around in-game knowledge which limits the fun riddling part of it - you either know what the game's name for Antidote Herb is or you don't (being on this side of the LP, I mostly don't For the next update I ended up brute-forcing the answer to a chest and I still have no idea why it's the answer, and it isn't even an in-game lore thing. So I would say that while it's an interesting alternate way to put the words together, I wish the riddles were a bit better and a bit more setting-agnostic.
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Jan 12, 2022 03:54
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Update 6: Tea We pick up outside of Midova. For reference, we're currently looking for tea, so a wizard will talk to us and take Aren under his wing, so he, too, can become a super wizard. But the tea has been repossessed by a loan shark who wants us to hunt down a guy who owes him money. For inscrutable reasons we aren't just pounding his head in and taking the tea, thus improving the world considerably along the way. All we know about the loan-ower is that he's in "Montari Territory," and where we encountered the most Montari was between Balmestri and Sortiga, so we sort of know where to go. Since I, uh, missed a bit of content in Imazi, however, and Briala and Aspreza have also been updated a bit for chapter 2(but not, oddly enough, Balmestri, Ligano or Sortiga), I'll be taking the long way down the east coast to clean up some of all that stuff.     The trip to Imazi is zero danger, since I already cleared it. Now let's poke our heads into Farmer Brunia's new cave. It strongly feels like there should be some kind of dialogue prior to ducking in, but I guess not.     Since we're dealing with some generic bandits, I decide to try out some of the new spells that Aren's been picking up in the meantime. First up is Web, cast at full power.  Web is actually pretty good at slowing down enemies if you get it off first, with the caveat that the web itself just sort of "flows" randomly from the target point. This means that casting it in the middle of a bunch of enemy melee combatants, it may either perfectly slow them down or inhibit you as much as it does them. Probably the best use is to drop it in the "escape corner," upper left, so that fleeing enemies can be picked off with spells and arrows before they get out of the combat area.  As an interesting note, unlike Owyn in Krondor, Aren is perfectly capable of calling down lightning from the sky to hit enemies even when below several meters of solid rock and dirt.   Next up is a group of five bandits, nothing interesting there, they go down like chumps. Lastly, however...   Four wizards in a super krangled combat plane? Please, what are they going to do?  Not like wizards have been any kind of threat so far. Turns out they have a new spell I can't get access to yet which looks like a projectile that can miss. It does, however, not miss any of the times they cast it and they just toast down Aren in a single round, prompting some amount of terror since judging by the usual spell costs I expect that they can cast it twice or thrice per caster per battle, meaning they can, if their AI judges it a good idea and I don't bully them appropriately, actually torch my entire team.  It feels like my owning them and not vice versa is more luck than skill. Anyway, let's head out and tell the farmer that we killed some people he hopefully wanted us to kill since we know nothing about them and more or less just killed them for being slightly shady in the wrong place.    His face always weirds me out, I'm not sure why.      Okay, cool, we've now given him control of a literal gold mine. We're not given a reward for this or any sort of immediate feedback that we did something smart, but as far as I can tell it might be important later.     We haven't seen Briala since the start of the game, but it has undergone a few changes.  Laura still hasn't moved from the well since we were last here, she's just been standing there, pining for Aren. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZYYnqhrs4A I feel like Laura dodged a bullet here, Aren seems extremely excited about this new lifestyle which sees him murdering several people per day, to the point that it matters more to him than a woman he was prepared to marry just a month ago. Maybe we can help her feel better, though...     Well, her mom certainly isn't any help. Maybe we can set her up with some eligible bachelor? Who do we know in this town?     And that's basically the end of that subplot. Laura, Scott and Laura's mom vanish from the game from this point onwards as far as I can tell, but at least we tried to bring it to a happy ending? While we're in town we can also visit Aren's dad a last time.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uRaeoYwIaw It goes better than saying goodbye to Laura does, though that's not saying much. Last thing to do in town is check up on whether or not we managed to save those cows.     The reward for having saved this guy's cows is that we get a full stack of Senwater, which is pretty good as rewards go. Since we can't get spells directly from scrolls any longer, really the only meaningful rewards are Senwater and equipment upgrades, the latter of which are reasonably rare. Next stop: Aspreza, which is hopefully less plagued this time around.    Last time we were here, all the doors with a red diamond on them got some mild variety of: "let's not gently caress around with this place, everyone inside is probably busy dying horribly." and no further results. Now that we've helped the Sisters north of Ligano by clearing out the Montari and giving them a stack of food, all four doors with red diamonds now have actual interactions. One of them being somewhat important, but most of them just being fluff.      As far as I can tell this is the only place in the game you can pay an NPC to repair stuff for you, which is pretty important as you'll occasionally stumble across a gear upgrade which starts with dogshit durability, and stuff you just pick up off the ground you can't immediately repair, it has to suffer some wear and tear in combat first, at which point you may then be able to laboriously inch it back up over its original damaged state. This is a bit of a difference from Krondor where A) stuff you picked up off the ground or dead enemies was repairable immediately nine times out of ten and B) where you very quickly got the skill levels to repair stuff 20 or 25 percentage points in a go if it was already rather beat up. If we hadn't helped out Aspreza, this would be denied to us, mind you, which is why doing so is rather big deal. Also of course for about 2/3rds of the game's chapters we also won't have access to Aspreza, so.       The reward for this is one of the rare-ish Emerald Shieldstones which I'm still desperately trying to find a shopkeeper that'll buy, since effective use of them would largely require being psychic. Still, nice of them. And it makes no difference if you choose cards or magic to entertain the kids with, except for the descriptive text that results. Just one last house left, now.    I still always forget to use Tonguecoat before selling and buying, but at least we helped an old man, ain't that nice of us? Now, back on the road to finding the mysterious Enkudi.     While heading along the southern coast past Balmestri, I get waylaid by a bandit ambush and decide it's a good chance to test out another one of Aren's new spells, Blazing Barricade.  Unlike a lot of non-"blow a mans up"-spells, this one actually has some uses! It creates this flaming field(always with the same radius, sometimes William or Kaelyn will spawn where the barricade would, in which case... move them before casting it. It knows no friendly fire) which does damage = duration(max of 20) to any enemies walking into it, and any round they end in it, they eat a further 2 to 3 damage, but for some reason it sometimes does this damage twice or even thrice, I don't understand the logic. If you stack up William and Kaelyn in front of Aren, enemies will usually very obligingly go stand in the fire to whack at them, and since it'll usually add up to being about another swing's worth of damage over the fight, it can make them go down a lot quicker. The main downside is that to make the most of it, you'll usually end up with a formation where Aren loses line-of-sight on most enemies, making him a bit less useful. But especially if you're fighting enemies that he can't Lightning Bolt away anyway, it might be superior.  The other downside is that chasing after fleeing enemies becomes more complicated and requires that you have a good set of bow and arrows, or some ranged spells and Aren in the right position, to blow them up.    It actually took me forever to find this jackass since "Montari territory," to me, was the coastal stretch between Sortiga and Balmestri, but he's actually a good bit along the road between Sortiga and Ligano, quite far inland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Cif5QcTS4 I love how confused the party is at the concept that someone might just want to help others. If you can't write an essay justifying why you want to help people, something fishy's up. Now, we don't actually have to finish Enkudi's task for him, since he already gave us the gems for Antoni, but there's an extremely good reason to do so.   So now we actually go to the Montari. Thankfully no enemies have respawned in their tunnels, at last not in any of the areas I went through.     At the very backmost part of the cave, down a small tunnel I missed, is this dried-up stream. Aside from the stream, there's also a chest I'm very happy to find.   Despite looking almost exactly like the chainmail the party's already wearing, this is Montari chain mail, identifiable as such by the black diamond in the middle. This suit is busted all to gently caress and thus completely useless to wear until I think to haul it back to Aspreza and pay to get it repaired, but when it's fully repaired it's 20% more protective and 30% more resistant to falling apart than standard chainmail. Seeing as how it's the third-best armor in the game, it's also a while before we can actually just go buy this from a store. Anyway, to complete the quest, you gotta jam the divining rod into the trickling stream, but it's a bit kludgy since you gotta find the one spot it'll accept.   Neither Chee from the colony or Enkudi has any dialogue about us having done this, but the reason we do it is that it has a hidden benefit.  In that it unlocks Aren's access to Water magic! And if I remember right, there are some absolutely busted spells in there. For now, all it does is unlock Dehydrate, which is the same as the basic melee-range static zap spell, except it does a tiny bit less damage and, presumably, works against targets immune to electric damage, if the game has any of those. What follows from here is a walk back up to Midova to get Antoni off of Paolo's back, so we can finally, after like an in-game month, get Finch his tea, and thus get him to teach Aren about magic.    Relatively speedy trip.      Now to go to Paolo...      It's worth noting that despite Paolo mentioning a refund, we never actually paid a dime to order the Chailan Tea in the first place.  The magic powder is, sadly, dogshit, because unless an encounter has specifically owned me before and I happen to know fired weapons were why, there are no real ways to identify when enemies are using or might be using weapon boosts.  And tea. I'm not sure why the sprite is a literal teapot when all the descriptions are as though it's just, you know, dried tea leaves, as is reasonable.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E6P-5zZWWg So, I have a couple of issues with this entire sequence. First, gently caress him for having had the tea all along. Secondly... They make a big deal of Aren "not knowing magic good yet" when by this point he has reasonably been roasting bandits and montari with lightning bolts every couple of days, no issues. What would've made this part stronger would've been if the game had, say... some sort of "wild magic" system, to borrow from D&D, where Untrained Aren had random strength values for the spells he cast, or random side effects, or something of the sort so that getting him formally trained in some way was actually a big deal. As it is, it represents a very minor change.  Though it does have the advantage that gains from trainers can push past the training limits imposed per chapter, allowing Aren to scoot slightly ahead of the curve. Now, William also doesn't make a big deal of it at this point, but our objective is now to reach Ticoro, to the west. Of course, I, being a genius who knows that the worst thing you can do in any game is to follow where the plot wants you to go, am having none of that. There was a little bridge to the west between Midova and Panizo that William was very unwilling to let us use in the last chapter, but this time he surely can't raise any issues with it.  And a quick map repost so the location names make any sort of sense to people.     The only obstacle to getting over the bridge is a small pack of bandits, and just like that, we're in a new region.   With new enemies! Crabs!  They're not dissimilar from Carliths, in that they slowly approach and then snip snob you for minimal damage. The only noteworthy thing about them?   They're inexplicably full of milk.   This entire region is also designed a bit different from the one we started in, Pianda. This is the Ticor region. While Pianda is more or less cities built around the edges of big rocks that you can't pass over, Ticor is a fishhook of towns built curling around and then through a large forest which we can travel through. Of course, large parts of said forest are clusters of impassable forest jpegs, which means that it's quite possible to get somewhat lost on the twisty paths since the overhead map is rather zoomed in and only shows you a chunk very near to where you are.  Also, practically every chest in this region I've found has been trapped and even using the Essence of the Wind buffs, I've been unable to crack them. Unlike in Krondor, I don't have a character that's the designated lockpicker, Aren is only marginally better than William and Kaelyn, and I've yet to find any trainers who can do anything about it. In any case, I mash through a few crabs and some lost Montari before reaching Waterfork, either the nearest or farthest city in Ticoro to Pianda, depending on which side you approach from.    Waterfork isn't the most happening of towns, but we can accidentally fix something while we're here.   But first, more songs at the local pub.    Now, uh, back in I think update 3 or 4, just after reaching Midova, I poked my head into the little cleft where Mage Finch would be at the start of Chapter 2, there was a chest there containing nothing but a scroll that's unreadable to the party but is marked as being related to the Contuso family. Let's see what happens if we toss it at this lady, once again I don't think anything ever implies that we should think to do so.      It apparently ends a decades-long family feud, which is good! And it also gets us an emerald, which is also good! We can either hock it for money if I ever find a loving gem trader again, or I can keep hold of it for a while longer and use it to get a magic item in a way that I'm 90% sure the game doesn't tell you how to do but you just have to kind of stumble into. You never know, though, maybe I'll actually find the hint that makes it make sense at some point.    Like practically every town in Antara, Waterfork has only one trader, and like most of said traders, this one has only one thing we might care about : Senwater. I've still yet to find out what the use for the loving Nudberries is.         Not a bad reward for a single Fidali Paste... in theory. A Banded Shield is roughly twice as effective at blocking as our existing Small Shields(and having played some more, it does seem to be correct that shields just sometimes roll a total deflection on a hostile attack, though certainly not with their listed protection percentage rolled straight), but this one, starting at 50%, means it's also 50% as effective... and thus literally no better than our existing Small Shields. It even has a lower Hardness than them and would thus come apart faster, and I've been drowning in Small Shields in practically every fight in Pianda.      This mention of the fisherman actually isn't just a piece of trivia, since said fisherman actually is in town and we can go talk to him. Visiting him is a grave mistake, however, as I'm about to learn...     What in God's sweet merciful hell is that concoction?! It'll haunt my loving nightmares. And I say this as someone from Scandinavia, I'm perfectly well-used to fish-based war crimes, but what in the everloving gently caress? That's absolutely rancid. I'd rather eat Icelandic Piss Shark. In any case, that's my cue to head down the road to Cardone before I hear more about any other terrifying local specialties.   Crossing this bridge, things open up enough that we could in fact scamper right up to Ticoro and end the chapter, and so out of curiosity I decide to have a look around(though I have more NPC's to interact with since I strongly suspect, once again, that many of these interactions will be chapter 1 exclusive and I don't want to miss out on them, so I don't actually enter Ticoro).    The mighty sand-coloured cube in the distance there is Ticoro. To the right is the bridge we'd have reached if we went by the main road and...    Huh, guess we couldn't have gone this way anyway. Lore-wise I seem to remember the Mehrat nation is supposed to be somewhere northwest of Antara? And speaking of Antara, I always found the capital's location to be weird. Capitals are generally either roughly central in their nation or on a major coast or waterway, it feels like. Having it tucked away in a mountain border just violates my sense of disbelief slightly.  Anyway, back to the south and we reach Cardone, at which point I realize I feel kind of confused by the setting's naming. Like on the one hand you have places like Panizo and Imazi which sound(to my ears) Italian, then you have Cardone which sounds more French, and then you also have stuff like Waterfork which sounds plain English. Maybe I'm the only one who cares about things like that, but I wish they'd kept to a consistent theming. As usual, we'll hit up the local drinking hole first, for clues and rumours.     This provides us with the first of the two Cardone-related subquests, finding the Beast of Cardone and doing something about it. We can also buy food here(though sadly no rations), along with an unusual item.  I believe it was the witch down in Sortiga who told us that Nudberry roots were useful as a painkiller. We will only ever need one(1) unit of Nudberry roots for one(1) sidequest, but there's no point to buying them here as there are some buried in a pile of rocks in the woods not far away.    The local store sets a new bar for uselessness, as it only sells the lowest tier of archery gear, which we literally started with, and which we have relatively little use for. Some of these constraints, on where you can go and what you can access, feel like a response to Krondor players snapping the game in half before chapter 1 is even over, but it also feels like an overreaction. I prefer a game that lets me snap it in half if I'm clever, to a game that tries too hard to provide a "curated" experience.     Most of the residents in town, meanwhile, are busy talking about how spooky and scary the Beast is even though it hasn't actually done anything other than make a lot of noise and eat some chickens.    With one exception, of course.      This crotchety old guy seems absolutely on the level and not like a weirdo dickhead at all. In any case, there are two ways to find out the answer to his riddle, and I did it the hard way(because of course I did), and I still don't get it. If anyone can actually figure out this loving riddle faster than I do, you're some sort of psychic wizard. Now! Cardone is about as forest-centric as possible. There's forest on both the northwest and southeast sides, and all we know is that the Beast is somewhere near or in the forest most likely. We have no idea what it looks like or where it might be roaming, so I make the wise choice of just stomping into the woods and completely going the wrong way.    While over here looking for a rock pile full of Nudberry roots(I find them), I get ambushed by a new enemy!  The sinister Trerangs, which are just straight up a lovely sprite of an ape that's been tossed through a dozen blue filters. They play a generic "OOK OOK OOK.mp3" every time they move or attack, and at first you'd think they're kind of laughable.  Until you remember that they're roughly about the size of chimps and that chimps can pry your arms off and beat you to death with them without breaking a sweat. They have abysmal attack stats, so most of their swings end up missing, but they can three-shot more or less any member of the party, and if they land the first two, the cumulative injuries will make the third hit extremely likely to land as well as making the injured party member super likely to be unable to hit back. Additionally, they seem to have some weird immunity where the ring of fire spell doesn't hurt them when they move into it. They still take the per-turn damage of 2 to 3 points, but not the ~20 points that every other enemy takes when first moving into it.    Exploring the woods to the southeast, and beating up more Trerangs as I go, I also stumble across this hidden temple of Senaedrin. Or, at least, I'd consider it to be hidden since it's about as out-of-the-way as is possible.  No interesting dialogue, and the temple only offers two services: curing poison and healing. Temple healing feels a bit superfluous considering that the only thing they could really need to cure is the near-death status, which would cost about 200 Burlas(for a full, total healing), meanwhile the herbalist in Waterfork sells a full stack of Senwater for 60 Burlas which accomplishes clearing up the Near-Death condition(with some Senwater to spare, even, it takes 20 bottles and a full stack is 25), and then you can just rest the rest away at an inn for almost no money, comparatively. Maybe if the game had some more hard-to-shake conditions, like damaged limbs or diseases, and didn't have omnipresent healing potions, if it was something a bit more like the frankly-cruel DSA(Die Schwarze Auge, AKA The Dark Eye) cRPG's which featured death from tetanus as a very real threat, divine healing would start to be much more important. Anyway, I'm rambling. The point is that the Beast isn't southeast of Cardone, it's northwest. So I head back over the creek, through Cardone, and promptly fail to find the Beast again.     In addition to Trerangs and Crabs, the woods over here also feature a few bandits, including these four who are busy staring at a chest. I walk up and casually stab them so I can stare at the chest instead.    And here we are again, confronted with Mage Chilblain's riddle. One of the two ways to get the answer is to solve the riddle here at the chest, then it's possible to go back and tell him you did it. I smashed my brain against it for close to fifteen minutes before I resorted to just brute-forcing my way through every word I could think to construct with the allowed letter combos. What I came up with, which worked, was: G-L-AS-S And frankly, even knowing the answer? I still don't see the logic. I'm sure it's something incredibly loving stupid and I look forward to someone explaining it to me.  Nothing amazing in the chest either, though pearls do sell for a decent amount. I think this one might land about 300 Burlas. In any case, at this point I've spent close to a literal hour hunting for the Beast of Cardone and I decide to look up a guide. It says he should be "northwest of Cardone," I've gone through all of the interior woods ten times over, but maybe he's at the edge of the woods? Time to go through them with a fine-tooth comb.     You see him? He's in one of these four screenshots. I think I walked past him well in excess of three or four times before I finally saw him. gently caress those colours, and frankly gently caress the use of overworld NPC's like this, too, they're hell to find, and they don't get marked on the map until the first time you've talked to them either, it seems. Son of a bitch.  In any case, now that I've found him, I advise everyone to brace themselves for some of the most amusingly dogshit voice acting in the game so far. It completely busted me up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D95HBNzCzoQ For anyone confused about what happened, this is the one place we need Nudberry Roots. We mix it with a ration, getting a Nudberry Ration, throw it at this guy which calms him down because he's just eaten a sandwich full of morphine, and then we can talk to him. And everything else about the conversation is just loving stupid. The reward is a stack of Grrlf Arrows, which finally make archery somewhat useful as they provide a +20% hit chance over normal arrows and a further +5 damage, too, meaning that they can actually hit reliably and do damage approximating that of just stabbing someone with a sword as well. I also want to repeat that I spent close to an hour finding this rear end in a top hat. I need to communicate how much that sucked. Ahem, in any case, time to head over to Mage Chilblain and tell him the answer to the riddle! I'm sure it'll go well.     Oh no! Who could have foreseen that he'd try to gently caress us up. What a tradgedy.  Now, I presume this rear end in a top hat knows some new cool spells that I could've taught Aren by letting him toss some of them around, but I hosed up and just went for the kill instead, which I think may have delayed by learning cold magic by several chapters. Killing Chilblain isn't exactly a challenge, anyway, considering that he's pulled the ol' Navon where he's technically an imposing opponent because of his stats(I think, presume, assume, or he may just be a moron), but a one-on-three fight is pretty hard to win unless you have some real bullshit up your sleeve.  Yeah, Chilly, how did you think this was going to work out? Did you think you'd get the drop on us and just wipe us out with magic or something? rear end in a top hat.  Perhaps the real magic was inside us all along. ... I'm kidding, I'm kidding! Roll him over and let's go through his pockets. If you didn't already have it from Imazi, there's a nice staff upgrade for Aren, and if you were a bit less completionist or thoughtful about where you sold your loot, you might not have been able to gear everyone up with chainmail from Panizo, so that might also be an upgrade. What's definitely an upgrade, though, is Chilblain's ring.  The Shadowring is a bit like the Weed Walkers from Krondor, providing a permanent stealth boost to the wearer. As another nice benefit, characters actually have a "jewelry" slot this time around, so passive boosters don't have to hang around their inventory taking up space and being a nuisance in that fashion.  All in all, that took me two and a half hours to accomplish, so that seems like a good place to take a break, especially as there are still another five towns to visit before the party reaches Ticoro.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:54
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rujasu posted:Anyway, there sure is a lot of brown and gray in this game. All we need is some waist-high cover and an assault rifle for Kaelyn and Antara will be would be decades ahead! Psion posted:the only thing I like better than long bullshit fetch quests for {{questitem.name}} are ones where they immediately undercut the value of what you just did by saying "hah I already had some!" Either that or the point was that Finch just wanted us to gently caress off and was, in fact, happy, that we left him alone to watch beetles for a literal month of game time.
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Jan 17, 2022 06:43
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MagusofStars posted:The Mage thing seems extra weird to me because he accepted the answer instantly without question. It's not exactly one of those riddles where you hear the answer and it makes intuitive sense; for all he knows we're totally on the wrong track. Unless he's already got an inkling of the answer, in which case, why not walk to the chest yourself and brute-force it, dumbass? What annoys me the most is that we don't even get to loot his store afterwards. We could've been rich!MagusofStars posted:Does the jewelry slot only allow one item to be equipped? It'd certainly be a lot more balanced than Krondor just counting passive boosters in inventory so you could just stack them as needed - even though it makes zero sense why Owyn would wear three pairs of Weed Walkers on his feet. I'll let you know as soon as I have more than one piece of jewelry. Magical accessories are in much shorter supply than in Krondor.Also Owyn could've been wearing a pair on his feet, a pair on his hands and a pair, uh, over his ears?
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Jan 17, 2022 15:46
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Evil Fluffy posted:Not knowing the riftwar books made so much of the game confusing. Why are some people calling this guy Pug and others call him Milamber? Who’s this FF4 Edward bard/duke that James knows? Or this goddamn woodsman in the middle of nowhere? Why the gently caress do James and Locklear refer to themselves as squires and Signeurs?? Yeah, this was my experience as well. Though I'll note that to 12-year-old me, none of the costumes and poo poo looked goofy, I absolutely ate that trash up and loved it. Hel posted:There's a reason most people keep to the standard elf, dwarf, orc, sexy catgirl non-human species with minor variantion. Because they've been around enough to not be instantly embarrassing, like the Grrlf. And the Grrlf are just the worst of it because of like... the game goes full-in on making them... animal-like. Like the Montari are just nice little mole fellas who live in the dirt and eat lizards and make chocolate. And the other species we'll meet later is, as I recall them, exotic enough to actually be interesting. The Grrrlf really just come across as fursuiters who get really into their Second Life roleplay.
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Jan 19, 2022 06:17
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Update 7: A Peaceful Land  In this update we'll be cleaning up most of the southwestern province, Ticor, before actually heading to Ticoro and completing the chapter. The exceptions are Antara itself and Korus Landing which we won't have access to for a while yet. It'll also be a relatively chill little trip, mostly containing dialogue and lore, since the roads here are relatively clean of enemies, being as it is in the heart of the Antaran Empire, comparable to the southeast of the Kingdom in Krondor, and due to there being few reasons to actually go off the road. I believe literally every town in this region also has updated content once we're a few chapters ahead, but in addition to that they also have unique chapter 2 content.   First up is Levosche.    Nothing unique at either the armorer's or the inn, but around this point I start noticing how many drat axes and crossbows are in the art and start wondering if they were originally intended to be part of the gameplay, too. In fact I'm pretty sure we see far more crossbows in the art than we do bows.       Unlike most trainers, who help out the entire party, this guy for some reason only trains Aren. I'm not sure if it's hardcoded to be Aren or if it just picks the character with the lowest Defense, though(which is likely to be Aren in anything but an edited savefile in any case), providing a +5 boost to his Defense stat.   Across from the defense trainer live the nice Ampersands which is... an odd choice for a fantasy name.    This guy has a somewhat complicated and mostly rewardless quest which I hosed up. I accidentally talked to the two NPC's later on, getting two-thirds of the info pieces he wanted, without even realizing I was getting them because this game is an excellent argument for the existence of quest logs, and the third chunk of information is apparently gained if you find an out-of-the-way code chest somewhere in Ticoro which I also missed. The reward for completing the quest is that in chapter 3, the joyman's song would be sung at one of the inns. So, eh, not something I'm terribly heartbroken over missing.   Ormede is next on the itinerary, and along the way I'm reminded not to keep casting Blazing Barricade all the time.  Here I'm about to tell William to attack the nearest rogue, there are two equally distant nearest hexes from which he can attack the rogue, except that one of them is currently shared with a bunch of fire.  So of course he walks into the fire. I'm kind of annoyed that the game doesn't in any way let you pick which hex characters attack from when there are multiple options or which direction they end up facing when making a move that doesn't terminate in an attack.    Ormede is one of those places where the game's presentation is at odds with what's actually being told, in that Ormede is mentioned repeatedly in connection with the Imperial Fleet and there's not so much as a pier here, or even a single ship.jpeg moored off the coast or anything. Also there's a bunch of bandits out of town menacing(?) a travelling trader.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf3lj8PgSwY Considering that he has nothing to say about it, it feels like I might've just killed a bunch of his customers or something. He's selling no new interesting items, but he does have both armorers' hammers and whetstones, the latter of which the party goes through at high speed trying to prevent their swords from crumbling like rotten wood.   For not being a large town, Ormede does have a number of folks to chat with.    Don't take this woman at her word, she doesn't just make your perishable food laster longer, she makes it last indefinitely by turning it into the non-perishable ration type of food instead. I think that with the right food types, or if you happen to roll a bunch of bandits or whatever carrying loads of perishable food, you could save a decent amount of money here, but food isn't exactly super expensive in any case, so it's a minor thing.     On the other side of the street are some racist kids that Kaelyn almost strangles for playing Ethnic Cleansing with their buddies.       This one is just flat-out a scam, and if you've been mostly trying to follow the objectives in a reasonable way without going out of your way to scour the land for resources and quests, 150 Burlas could be a decent-sized loss, especially considering some of the less obvious scams the game is planning to throw our way soon.   The only store in town is this jeweler where some random person looks about to help themselves to the ol' five-finger discount. The prices for our gems are worse here than in Aliero, but I'm desperate to free up some inventory space. Also they sell nothing but non-magical gems and jewelry here, so there's nothing that's relevant for us to buy.   At the inn there's someone waiting for us with a quite long-winded lead-up to trying to take our money in a game of cards...          I turn down the offer because some scams, at least, are pretty obvious.  Lastly, on the far side of town, past the inn, there's a house we definitely want to hit up.       I choose "Area" since I'm hoping it might bump me over the edge needed to access some AoE destructive spells, though sadly it doesn't. Magic-training Aren is mostly relevant as a time-saving measure or when it can bump him over a chapter limit, every other skill needs actual practice, but magic can apparently be learned purely by Aren sitting around a campfire and theorizing a lot(with the exception of learning access to new types of magic, of course).     Next along the line is Ravenne on the western side of the Ticoro fish-hook.     I feel like the writing in Antara that works are often these encounters with people completely unrelated to the story or any kind of adventuring-related thing. Like just some dude having a good time making some stained-glass windows and being a happy fella.    Ravenne has a generic inn with no talkable NPC's or songs, and a general store which, oddly enough, actually has a gear upgrade for Kaelyn and William.  A shield upgrade! I find it odd that these shields that are literally just a carved slab of wood are superior to banded or metal shields. I suppose that, yeah, it would be pretty hard to hack through a goddamn slab of wood with a sword, but at the same time it also feels like it would most likely also be heavier to carry around than a conventional shield. But maybe someone who knows more about historical shields can tell me what actual shields were like and which ones are actually most useful! Now, on the far side of the store...   Is the only museum in Antara! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox5Jr_hdBN8 I think what's actually a shame about the museum is having the museum manager be the only person expositing about all of the objects. I think what could've been interesting would've been the PC's taking a poke at some of the objects, maybe Aren goes: "gee whiz folks what's this?" and then Kaelyn or William could reveal some of their personality and interests by revealing that they're actually deeply interested in the art of the Chungus region or that they were once stalked by a Killdog like the stuffed one on display, and maybe Aren could even surprise the other two by showing that he actually knows about one of them and isn't purely ignorant farmboy. So! While we're here, we can also make use of that emerald. Note that the bust is of an Emperor, and has only a blue eye. We had a puzzle chest waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back where the answer was that an ancient Emperor had both a blue and a green eye. So what if we... complete the bust?    The Circlet of Senaedrin is a jewelry-slot item that vaguely boosts the wearer's rate of healing. I slap it on Aren since he's the one guaranteed to be "injured" in almost every fight(i.e. his spellcasting drains his health and stamina to work at all) and... I gotta be honest? I literally can't tell what difference it makes. Over like an hour of gameplay I can't tell if it notably makes him heal faster. It's possible that the improvement is very light, it's also possible that it's bugged and just doesn't work. Then behind the museum we have one of the things that jukes my balls the most about fantasy settings.        Like, Kaelyn. Please, please. You know this is a setting where magic exists, you know that the temples are real and their magic works, you've been loving blessed this month, you've been nurtured back from the brink of death by the holy water of Senaedrin's sect, so how the gently caress are you acting like you're an atheist now? Fantasy atheists are always weird to me. Like I can perfectly accept poo poo like the Athar from Planescape who just want to kill or defy the gods, but they at least agree that the gods are real and their powers exist. With that rant out of the way, this is also where we can actually get the answer to the Glass riddle from Cardone!     Turns out there is no logic! It's just a children's rhyme!   The last thing that's of interest for Ravenne in this chapter is that behind the house of the Henne-worshipper Kaelyn got angry with, there's a buried pile of Dervish Discs. As someone mentioned earlier, they are indeed pretty powerful defense boosters, which is nice. Now I just need to remember to actually use them.    Our next port of call is Melay, the only thing along the way that's interesting is something I notice at the river.   This river ford was funny to me because the little stepping stones are set so far apart that you're just sort of floating over the water half of the time. Minor entertainment, but I'll take what I can get, back to Melay!    Melay has the distinction that it's the only place in the entire game where we use a bucket. So I guess that's notable! Now let's interrogate the locals to find out where and how and why we should make use of the bucket.          God drat that's a lot of dialogue. That bucket's gonna lead to something amazing, like a unique weapon or piece of jewelry or armor or something. Anyway, now we know it's related to some missing art!        And now we know that it's a missing malachite cat with gem eyes. Hm. Not much of a clue to the location. Maybe the last NPC in this little part of town will have the advice we need?    So there are two ways you could reason this one out. Either A) you could know about malachite, that it's water-soluble, consider that the well is "scummy" and decide to dunk the bucket into the well. or B) you could simply latch on to the keyword "WELL" and reason that BUCKET goes in WELL and use the bucket on the well. I'm not sure which the developers expected.   This yields up no malachite cat, but does yield up the torchite gem! Since that part isn't water-soluble. I wonder what the gem mage will do with it?     A loving shieldstone for all those loving words-words-words. Goddrat. I can't even sell shieldstones. Maybe the store and the inn will redeem this town.   Aside from Carlith Mating Rituals, the gambling-boosting book we've already had our hands on, this store has a couple of super-expensive books. But you know what? I like boosters. Let's see what's up with these two. Maybe... Halder's Tale first?               Good God! So, that's a lot of text, and 450 Burlas down and that gave us... loving nothing. loving nothing. The most expensive item I've bought so far, aside from chainmail for the gang, is just a loving fluff book, and nothing prior to purchasing it indicates this, when every other book in the game so far has been a stat booster. Man I feel robbed. At the very least the other book is actually a stat booster, but it costs the exact same price!  Ponaka's Last Stand is a +5 Defense book which, as with the other books, all party members can read and get the boost from.  And there's nothing at the inn. I will be so glad to never see this loving town again.   Let's just head up to Varnasse and get this drat chapter out of the way.     Nice enough place, there's not a lot of chatter here, but there is some.      Surprisingly, they're actually talking about a place that's in the game and which can eventually be visited.     I love labour disputes in my games.    Varnasse has the obscenely expensive Rapier as a weapon upgrade, except for having a non-functional Hack attack, it's better at both Thrusting and Swinging than the Longsword. An odd thing about it is that the Betrayal in Antara wiki has different stats for it than the game does, which makes me wonder if it's a version difference or if displayed stats aren't quite the real ones. Thanks to the loving book down in Melay, I can only afford one, so William gets it(off-screen I also hoof it back to Aspreza and pay 200 gold to get the Montari Chain repaired and slap it on him as well).     I really wish they had more outdoors terrain like this. Toss off some walls or palisades around small towns, have the occasional shrine or whatever.     The last thing in Varnasse is on the far side of it, where the bridge towards Antara is coincidentally down. I'm not sure why they bother to block off the road in this direction with that, though, since they're often happy to just have the party complain and refuse to go in different directions, for instance we can't go north to Korus Landing, or into an area north of Ticoro(in the latter case, Aren complains about not wanting to leave Pianda until Finch has trained him, which seems like a bug). With that sorted, in any case, it's time to head to Ticoro and continue the plot. We've got a hanging thread about the Imperial Consort dangling all the way from the intro, after all.    It's worth noting that entering Ticoro happens just by approaching the gate, so if you're just passing by in order to get to, say, Varnasse, you'll want to give the gate a wide berth until you're actually ready to head in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_m6jrQZNI8 Once again thanks to whatever brave souls found a way to record these videos at a non-postage-stamp resolution without the game crashing 2/3rds of the way through them every time. Next time: we poke around Ticoro and probably get into some trouble along the way.
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Jan 20, 2022 15:13
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Evil Fluffy posted:Each update just makes me more and more grateful that I never bought this game. As much as I liked BaK as a kid, this would've probably killed my interest in these kinds of games in general. Sometimes it suffers strongly from feeling like you've just walked into an encounter that had a chunk of intro dialogue missing or expected you to have encountered some previous situation that got edited out of the game at a late stage.
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Jan 21, 2022 20:58
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I still have no idea what our goal is. So a dying man mumbled something about the Consort, who's the intended husband of the Antaran Empire's princess, being in trouble, and handed us a gaudy amulet alongside it. After spending like two months incinerating every bandit in Pianda and hacking up every monkey and crab in Ticor, we finally bothered to go where the Consort is supposed to be, Ticoro, to try and maybe warn him that he's in danger.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:02
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sb hermit posted:I found it funny that the Museum curator used the phrase "face of the Earth" because I figure that they would have a replacement name for their world. Oh, they do, the world as a whole is called "Ramar."
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Jan 23, 2022 10:25
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Xander77 posted:We don't say "off the face of Terra", to the extent that that's our shared name for our world. To an extent I feel like it can be defended because, logically, it being a fantasy setting, they (probably) aren't really speaking, say, English, it's just translated for our convenience. In their own language they almost certainly have a word that roughly means the same thing as "spartan" in terms of describing something, and thus it's actually that term we're hearing translated. Authors who invent a neologism for every culturally grounded term we have just need to be beaten around the face and neck with a pineapple or something. Also she could've just said "face of the world" which would've been nice and neutral.
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Jan 23, 2022 21:28
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Update 8: Need For Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_m6jrQZNI8  Welcome to chapter 3! It starts off a bit oddly, as we enter Ticoro from the north at the end of chapter 2(the only side we can enter it from) yet spawn at the south end of the city when the chapter starts proper, after a cutscene of the party briefly forgetting they're here to prevent some sort of plot involving a threat to the Emperor or at least his family. We won't be seeing the world map at all this chapter, as it occurs entirely within the walls of Ticoro which comes with some... issues. First, though, we've got yet another Grrrlf here to make us all cringe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un2BwG6etkg Yes, thank you, the character building we needed for Kaelyn was that she enjoys participating in horny furry rituals. Now, moving on and absolutely forgetting that encounter for as long as possible, the party feels pretty unhurried about needing or wanting to find the Consort and warning him of impending danger, so let's start by having a look around first off.  We conveniently start off facing an inn, so let's drop by there.    Visiting the inn, we're promptly treated to the incredibly lovely gimmick of this chapter. Being that it's a city, we can't just light a campfire on a street corner and take a nap there like we could... anywhere else in the game. Instead we need to use an inn. And there's only one inn in the entire city we can actually rest at, all the rest are booked full. This becomes a problem both because the combat is supremely balanced around being able to take a nap after every fight, otherwise Aren is pretty loving useless, and secondly we can hardly walk from one side of the city to the other without these lazy assholes complaining about being tired, and then fatigued(which, of course, comes with stat penalties). We can undo the injuries with a sufficient supply of Senwater, but the fatigue penalties are only banished by actually getting some sleep, so finding an inn is priority numero uno. The map of the city thankfully starts off explored... but of course unmarked, so it's up to us to guess which of the city's many vaguely rectangular polyhedrons are inns and which ones we can actually rest at.   While I complain about that, I stumble across one of the city's several stores, and one of the few that're actually useful in any way.   Aside from letting us unload armor to fund our stay(because of course the city is going to be crawling with as many heavily-armed random encounters as the roads are), he also sells Montari Chain. Getting that suit we found repaired for 200 burlas saved us almost 1200 burlas, which is pretty huge considering that the party's constrained to carrying about 3000 burlas at once, if they don't want to completely forego also carrying food.    Reasoning that there has to be a useable inn somewhere near the gates, that the game wouldn't be so cruel as to hide it away too far from where I start, I poke around the southwestern corner of Ticoro when I get ambushed.   A couple of things are worth noting about the encounters in Ticoro. Firstly they've stepped up their equipment game, wielding exclusively Rapiers and almost all wearing Chainmail. Aside from being able to hit us harder, which sucks, it also means it suddenly takes an extra hit or two to bring them down, often resulting in more enemies escaping than getting killed. In several fights I only managed to bring down one enemy before they scarpered, which is worsened by the more cramped battlefields meaning enemies can often escape in a single round of movement from just about anywhere on the battle grid.  With this first group sorted, I decide to harass the random person living behind them.   How strange, the amulet seems to scare people. I wonder if it is, perhaps, associated with some sort of violent extremist group that by all rights and logic, at least two members of the party should be well-acquainted with and which the third could reasonably have heard of, too? Impossible.    With that being a bust, I head up to the big central plaza, along the way running into what looks suspiciously like an open grave. Who the hell is digging graves on the curb here if we're not even allowed to sleep there? And more importantly, will they give a gently caress if we loot the chest they left behind?   Amazingly, it contains a magic ring that Aren gets instantly, a Ring of Welcoming which boosts his Lockpick skill. I pass the Circlet of Senaedrin to Kaelyn since I can't tell if it actually works or not(it turns out one jewelry item per character is the cap. sad!).   At the other side of the entrance to the central plaza is an NPC who'll talk at us, or, rather, at William. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7iMgh0ouN0 I'm really starting to miss the Ren Faire hats and costumes of Krondor, why is everyone dressed so brownly?! Anyway, meet William's father in law. This encounter is kind of irrelevant except that it tells us which inn we can find another irrelevant NPC at. Well, irrelevant to completing the game or giving us any gameplay advantages, at least, not irrelevant to telling us about the rich and colourful world of Ramar.     The big church of Henne in Ticoro has no unusual services or conversations, just their standard vague blessing option. Looks rather nice, though. The square outside feels like a missed opportunity for a "festival" town, though. Toss in a few street trader stalls, etc. and maybe some NPC's in colourful costume and such. If that would grind the game's engine to a halt, make it a sort of enterable "scene" like the market in Midova. As it is, it makes the city feel deserted more than anything.    At this point night has started to fall in Ticoro, and the party is starting to complain about being Tired, but not quite Fatigued yet. This, of course, is when I run into another gang of Ticoro's omnipresent thieves.     Four of them, and of course all but one of the assholes escapes. This is starting to get annoying. Maybe I should just start out every fight by covering the entire battlefield in Web and then taking it from there.   It doesn't help that the crusty-rear end implementation of darkness in Antara contributes to it being impossible to spot shop signs at more than arm's length, even the overhead map is darkened by it being night, so I accidentally stumble into someone's house while looking for an inn.   It's slightly odd that private home interactions are only occasionally blocked by the time of day, most of the time people will be up for their scripted interactions whether it's mid-morning or mid-night.  Some time behind midnight, the party stumbles into yet another inn, desperate for a bed.    They, too, are all up, but... notice that NPC in the back of the common room view? The lady in the red dress almost completely blocked from view by the server who has the same interaction icon(for buying food only) as the lady in red has? Yeah, she's someone we can talk to! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUD4RnhA2A And she's actually... actually I'm not sure if she ever pops up again, but she's William's fiancee, and thus, theoretically, an important person. And also a huge dickhead, a walking, talking argument for viciously beheading as many nobles as possible. Let's get out of this joint.    Around when the horizon starts to lighten, the party practically trips over a coded chest in a deserted alleyway.  J-A-E-GE-R  The contents of the chest are a bad shield and... Attractors. What Attractors are supposed to do is that they're supposed to increase the benefit shields give against enemy archers. On the one hand, enemy archers are rarer than enemy mages even, and on the other hand shields already do not provide any benefit against arrows(it's purely a roll vs the Defense stat of the target). I've seen multiple comments stating that Attractors actually do not work at all. Considering the rarity of enemy archers, I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance to clear up whether they do or not.    Bumbling into some enemies in the dark, the party accidentally stabs them seven times and then loots their pockets, hoping they were actually thieves and not just drunks from the festival out late.  One of them was carrying this very nice bow upgrade, though, which goes a long way towards taking care of any issues I have with feeling bad about killing them, also being the first bow upgrade we've found or had access to, not popping up until now in chapter 3.  Compared to the starter bow, it's 4% more accurate and also has a +4 damage modifier where the starter bow has none at all. Considering that Grrlf Arrows fired from the starter bow do about 25 damage, that's close to a 20% boost, which is great.    It's literally dawn and the party has yet to find that goddamn inn that's supposed to be on the "eastern side" of Ticoro. We did find a store, though. What kind of store? A useful store?  Ha ha, of course not. That would be ridiculous.  I loop back to the armor trader to offload some bloodsoaked chainmail for a nice reward and then, now that it's day and thus actually visible, pull up the map to ponder which building I must've missed entering during the night, reasoning that it must be the large one to the southeast that's being hugged by another building shaped like a Tetris piece.   If you see the chest there, so did I, and after ten attempts it blew up the party every time because the fatigue was completely tanking Aren's lockpicking score, so I give it a pass for now.   But gently caress me, it's an inn! It's an inn! Here's hoping it has rooms!   Let's see what Scott has to say, maybe he can put us down gently and without pain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwoQffwdf0M It's weird that for once there's no intro dialogue to him. Anyway, Scott claims he can help us... can he really?  He can! We now have a place to rest! Of course, as mentioned, we can barely cross to the opposite corner of the city before night falls, so we'll be back here a lot since there's no non-rest way to pass time other than literally running in circles. The party promptly drops unconscious for close to two full days. First thing I do when they wake up is dip out, turn the corner and take a shot at that trapped chest again.     Some business left their ledgers lying around, and just staring at the numbers makes the party better at trading so they can get better prices in shops. I guess that's how learning works.  In the southeasternmost corner of Ticoro are these little square shacks and... let me just go on a tangent about the layout of this city and how much I loving hate it. It feels almost randomly generated because there are few like... actual thoroughfares and streets. Everything just feels randomly rotated and placed, which means half the time there's no obvious "front" to a building where you'd expect the door to be. For the instance, the only inn we can get a room at has its front door facing the city walls, as out-of-the-way as possible. Anyway, these little shacks all have the same bit of dialogue attached to them.  This seems completely irrelevant at the moment, but it's actually part of the somewhat dumb way we're going to complete this chapter.   Poking around near the southern gate where we entered finds me another trapped chest that Aren this time disarms with only five failed attempts.  It contains another Shadow Ring, which goes on Kaelyn, guaranteeing that the party will now only gently caress up four out of five ambush attempts, rather than nineteen out of twenty.  The Academy Pass I think we don't get to use until like... chapter 6 or something. Still, it might be interesting once we get to do so.    The large structure near the southern gate is the Corner Store, which is a godsend as it means I have a source of Senwater and thus don't need to bail back to the inn to recover after every fight.   Heading back to the western side of town, I also noticed that I missed this building last time I was in the area.    I don't think that doing this has any kind of payoff(though I do love learning that the trades unions on Ramar are extremely powerful, hell yeah), but I'll drip back by Varnasse next time I get a chance to see if it updated anything there.  Dominating the western side of Ticoro is this large structure which I think is supposed to look mansionlike and... it has... a resident. Let's meet that resident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N34_t6s7p5c You know, maybe if the game had lead with a blatant, moustache-twirling rear end in a top hat like this guy, dressed like he's loving Dracula or some poo poo, it might have drawn people in more easily. What a titanic prick! Imagine that, just standing around bragging openly to William that he's going to bankrupt his in-laws. You absolutely get an urge to give him a swirlie or toss some rocks through his windows or something.   Across from his mansion, a group of thugs kill Aren. This happens quite a few times in Ticoro, I think like three times or so, because the narrower battlefields means they can often close with him instantly and their rapiers mean they can do more damage to him, which our armor upgrades don't wholly negate. On top of that, as far as I can tell, health and stamina never upgrade like they did in Krondor(basically being boosted by longer playtime/more resting and one or two events).   What's somewhat more interesting is what I find next to his mansion. It's a chest... with a new kind of puzzle lock!  The objective is to have the bead colours and amounts, and only those, shown at the top, be represented in the chutes below. Between them are "exchange rates" which function in both directions. For instance, if I exchange the Blue and Yellow beads I start with...  I get two reds and a white, and it also works in reverse. That's actually also the first step in solving the chest, but I'll spoiler the remainder of the solution. Exchange the white bead for a yellow and a green, then exchange the two reds and the yellow for a blue, leaving you with a blue and a green bead, the solution.  The reward is a minor gemstone and some Shadowmilk, a temporary stealth booster potion. It's not big, but I do like these bead lock chests. They don't rely on setting knowledge or obscure clues, but at the same time they're also surprisingly hard to brute force since you end up with a lot of permutations, you pretty much need to either get lucky or to sit down and think through what combinations will give you what you want.   Continuing up the west side I find those other general store which is interesting only for the fact that I'm certain we've seen that exact same blue-robed woman helping herself to some gems from a store in... was it Ravenne? Ormede? Somewhere out there getting the five-finger discount. I wonder if that's intentional or if the artists were just a bit uninspired on character design.   In the far northwest of Ticoro we find yet another mage trainer for Aren.         Annoyingly, but appropriately, time in the gameworld passes while Aren gets his lessons, so it ends up being night again by the time we're free to move on. So it's another slog back to the inn before I can explore the northeast of the city. I'll note at this point I have explored the northwest, the southwest and the southeast, and the party has yet to accrue any kind of clue with regards to reaching the Consort.   While coming up the east side, I find this store that doesn't sell anything... anything, that is, except for conversation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCyhvdDp_Xg We should keep him in mind.    Pushing into the northwest of Ticoro, I get ambushed by a new enemy type.  Mechanically they're no different than thieves, bandits or pirates, but story-wise these are Shepherds. They've popped up in mention a few times before now, and are also mentioned in the background lore in the manual. To recap, they were a core part of the original effort to not get humanity eradiated by the Grrrlf back when the Grrrlf as a culture were more warlike, and in the wake of the war remained as watchdogs keeping an eye out for any future Grrrlf incursions. Now, with war with the Grrrlf being a thing of the past, the Shepherds have instead turned into a chuddy alt-right movement arguing that Antara should take this moment to strike and genocide the Grrrlf once and for all. Because they're huge assholes. Tiring of enemies being damage sponges in this chapter, I also start oiling William and Kaelyn's swords to see what sort of a difference it'll make, remembering that Naphtha in Krondor was an insane damage boost and hoping it'll be something of the same caliber.  It's... not quite. In Krondor, boosters added a flat damage percentage(either 50% or 100%) on top. In Antara, oiled swords just gain another d10 of damage on top, which means it'll be at best about 30% extra damage per swing, but may also roll out to be practically no extra damage at all. I'm not really a fan of it, I feel like limited-use consumables should at least have a reliable utility.  Oh and the Junior Fascism League of Antara also kills Aren again. He's really not having a good chapter of it. Past them...   I think this is meant to be a huge well or something? I'm not entirely sure. Not that it serves any gameplay purpose. We've now searched almost all of Ticoro, there's only the central northern section to check out, which contains something wonderful besides how it might help me progress the plot.   Finally a store that'll buy all these loving rapiers I've been having Kaelyn haul around. In fact, selling all the armor and swords in this chapter presents a new problem...   Remember how gold and food had their own, shared, sub-inventory? That inventory can actually fill up! Thankfully I have a few perishable foods looted from enemies that I can toss. Figuring I might as well, I then clear out my inventory issues by buying up a suit of Montari Chain Mail for Aren.  While the model is largely the same, it feels like a nice detail that due to the taller and lankier builds of the Montari, it ends up as more of a chain robe practically past Aren's knees. Fingers crossed this helps him not eat poo poo from being repeatedly stabbed every five minutes.   In the far northwest corner of Ticoro, I find something that looks a bit... off.  With most other things featuring a somewhat better fidelity, this "gate" really looks weird as poo poo and stands out for how low-resolution it is. Like it's not even a gate, it's just metal rods shooting out of the ground, the spaces between them are about as wide as doorways. It feels like a placeholder graphic. In any case, this just leads on to the walls, by the looks of it, and while there's a keyhole next to it, we can't interact with either.  The only thing remaining is the northern gate.        Once again, a dead end... or so I thought. See, I walked away from the gatehouse, ready to sweep the city for any homes I might've missed(there's almost certainly at least one or two), but couldn't find anything. I then looped back to the gatehouse and it turned out there was a dialogue trigger outside, a mandatory dialogue trigger, so poorly placed that the elite strategy of "just walk straight south from the gatehouse" somehow allowed me to miss it.   So now we finally have something vaguely approximating a lead! Possibly! God, I can easily see how this chapter could dead-man-walking people if they came into it with insufficient Senwater and explored in the wrong direction from the only inn that works, since there are two or three mandatory fights required to reach its door. You could easily end up painting yourself into a corner by being too wounded and/or fatigued from lack of sleep to actually be able to reach the only place in the game where you'd be able to recuperate.  Since it already took me close to two hours, what with all the slogging back to the inn constantly, I call it a break here. If I find the consort quickly, I guess I'll just have to record the end of chapter 3 and the start of chapter 4 for next time. Next time: Progress? Maybe?? Possibly???
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Jan 27, 2022 11:26
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Psion posted:the Nighthawks made it into this game too? Look it's... it's loving dumber. Spoiler: From chapter 4 onwards everyone loving knows about the Shepherds, they're not a loving secret or anything. William is the son of a nobleman, he should be aware of a major destabilizing extremist group. Kaelyn is friends with Grrrlf, she should be well aware of the Shepherds and all their bullshit. Aren... could conceivably be excused but it would also be perfectly believable that Shepherds had attempted to recruit in Briala at some point so he's at least aware of their existence even if he hes doesn't know a lot about their goals.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:35
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sb hermit posted:Selana seems to have a bit of southern belle twang. Or maybe it's just me. I'm going to say that anything stylistic about this game is accidental because we've got French-Italian town names, German names for some monsters and a noble class(Jaegers) and very British names for people(Caverton, Sheffield, etc.) so it feels a lot like someone just yanked out whatever was in their mind at the moment with these things. But you never know, maybe there's like one person in the making of this game who considered their options or something and actually made an effort to pick the right one.
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Jan 28, 2022 07:12
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Update 9: The Update With the Pope Buckle up, because this episode there's going to be a hell of a lot of talking, including some that's slightly baffling.  We start out where we left off, by Ticoro's northern gate, and I decide to start by heading over to the locked Ramparts gate to see if the PC's want to chime up about the solution, just to avoid having an unset flag screw up anything. They don't, however, so I beeline for the solution.  We're headed back to the locksmith who couldn't do anything for us earlier, just in case he happens to want to make a criminal of himself to help us, some random fuckos he's never met before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFB_fsgD78 Surprisingly enough, he's on board if we can find whoever's making him look bad. Now, you could waste a hell of a lot of time figuring this part out, but remember that we found a couple of little square shacks with their locks popped last update? Now, if we head back there...   There's a new NPC standing around, admiring his handiwork. Let's shake him down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrr8iZeZww Now it's just a matter of heading back to the locksmith... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDOC9YZZTYc And now we have our key! However, we actually want to head back to the apprentice again. Not just because letting him know he's back in the warm is good manners, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsdQuJPDCjM Instead it's because this guy represents one of the extremely rare chances to up Aren's lockpicking skill(a not-insignificant +10, too). Considering the RNG it's not so important for normal locks since it's just a matter of mashing picks into them until they're busted open, but since every failed attempt at a trapped lock requires a reload, having a high lockpicking skill is very good for my blood pressure. Off to the ramparts with us!   Along the way I stumble into a couple of chests I'd missed earlier, one is simply locked.  It contains this grounding wire which, if I remember right, is very handy for some areas that have enemies that have pure lightning attacks that'll gently caress you up proper without this stuff. It gets to hang around my inventory.   I also find one of the game's easier bead chests. Red bead becomes green and yellow, the yellow bead then becomes a green and blue, solving the chest. It feels like this might've been the one the party was meant to find as their first bead chest.  It contains poison for swords and arrows which sadly has the same issue as poison in Krondor. It's nasty for us because a poisoned weapon adds 100% poison to the victim(not just the 5% per hit like the Maslith's spit), which requires Fidali Paste or a shitload of Senwater to cure, but in the battle itself it's only 1 damage per round which fights aren't long enough to allow to seriously add up, and enemies don't need to worry about post-battle care like we do. The game's even gotten stingier about poison cures than Krondor, too. Unlike in Krondor where one unit of Silverthornw Anti-Venom cured 100% poisoning, one unit of Fidali Paste only cures 50% poisoning at a go, so sufficient dickheads getting their war crime practice on can drain our supplies right quick.   I just can not get over this loving gate. loving Albion would've been ashamed of it.   So they actually made the ramparts run all the way around the town, as appropriate, but unless I'm extremely blind, there's literally nothing up here but our quest objective which is five steps away from the stairs.      Turns out the Consort was, in fact, staying at the very first inn we tried to rent a room at just as we came into town. We could've saved a hell of a lot of time just by being more insistent with that innkeeper, I guess.   Since our last visit, a new NPC has been added, the fella with the moustache on the left. Let's annoy him.     So that was a total bust. Now what? I'll leave it up to the reader to consider what a logical next course of action might be. Waiting till night and then sneaking into the inn? Busting back in, swords drawn, and forcing our way past the guards to the Consort? Maybe visiting Lord Caverton or Lord Sheffield or some other NPC and telling them that since we know where the Consort is, they might as well let us in to see him?    Nope! Nothing tells us, though I suppose eventually repeated "you're getting fatigued!"-complaints would drive us there, but we're actually supposed to head back and take a nap to advance the plot. And when we do... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L--Rpy7NXOg It's cutscene time! For those who don't want to watch the crusty video, what happens is that we're rudely awakened in the middle of the night, accused of having kidnapped the Consort, tossed into a prison caravan, rolled out of town and then Kaelyn's Grrrlf friend, whose name I keep forgetting because all of the Grrrlf names sound like onomatopeia for rude bodily functions to me, saves everyone by popping the guards with horse tranquilizers while they're camping on the way to Antara. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWitnWQ46pY Chapter 4 then starts with a quick discussion of our objectives. Kaelyn, and her friend, will go look for her dad because weird stuff is happening. Aren and William, meanwhile, we'll stay in charge of as they go looking for the Shepherds and the Consort(again). We're given a quick chance to shuffle items between the three PC's we've had so far, and then Kaelyn vanishes, and we're left about a half hour's journey along the road between Ticoro and Varnasse, at night. So the first thing we do is stop by the roadside and camp until dawn.   Oh hey, it's this guy again. Let's ask him what's going on, I'm sure he's got a lot to tell us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYD0ZRFeWXc Revelations: The racist cult is, in fact, real bad. Also we can find one of the racist cult members if we travel to Isten!  I believe the only way there is through Korus Landing, sooooo... let's go down the Melay-Waterfork road first. There are actually some updated encounters down here we'll want to check out. Plus a good bunch more dialogue.    As usual, the chapter change has seen some repopulation of the map with new enemies, which generally have armor and weapons comparable to enemies in Ticoro. The main difference, though, as you might notice from the number of corpses, is that unlike the enemies inside Ticoro, enemies out here actually stand their ground and let me cut them to ribbons rather than running away and denying me valuable loot.   Shortly before reaching Melay, I also stumble into an ambush.  More shepherds! And a group of four despite us only having two characters to maneuver around. On top of that, shepherds feel like they usually have the better gear of the enemy types we fight.    Not that it helps them much , being able to rest anywhere and not having every enemy start in range of Aren also does a lot to defuse how dangerous they are.  The two things of note here are that 1) we've got a new type of armor! and 2) enemies are now starting to field poisoned swords and arrows which suuuuuuuucks, it super suuuuuuuucks and I hate it and I want it to go away.  The breastplate is a slight armor upgrade over our Montari Chain Mail, but also falls apart slightly faster. Not that it's a great issue since, while weapons in Antara fall apart like they're made of rotten wood, I've never had a suit of armor go below 80% durability no matter how much I got the idiot squad beaten up. It also has one other important thing about it...   Which is that while it looks okay on William, it looks downright silly on Aren. The Montari mail kinda worked for his stance because of the way it hung on him, but the breastplate just... with the super un-dynamic stance it just cracks me up. Maybe I'm the only one.    Melay has received no updates since we were last here, so the party breezes through.   Halfway to Ravenne, a kindly band of robbers decides to drop a new sword for William.   In addition to looking weird with his paperdoll, it's arguably an upgrade over the rapier, doing more damage but being less accurate. The wiki insists that a store in Ticoro carried it as well, but I apparently never found that store. I absolutely hate the Ticoro map.     First thing of note in Ravenne is that it's where Scott's hiding out in chapter 4. I do kind of like the idea of a consistent NPC that pops up in all chapters with quest hooks, world state updates, little lore tidbits, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVx5DB2VN0 In this chapter he's mostly good for a bit more information about the Shepherds. I'll note, again, that loving everyone seems to know about them except for our goons. Aside from Scott, there are two new NPC interactions in the town outside.         This one falls a bit flat for me, personally. As for the other one...     Aw, a kitty. Mind, that last paragraph is a heavy-handed hint that we should try entering the house again...       Aside from a little story(and frankly I have no idea if Stuart's comments are just babble, if they're meant to be profound or if they're supposed to be some sort of deep clue for something later on), the main outcome of this is a stat boost to Aren's generic "spellcasting" stat which, I think just governs accuracy for spells that can miss. Mind you, we now have a 70 cap on all the magic "types" and I expect to unlock a few more spells during this chapter. Aren's already gotten two, Gift of Sen(which is literally just Gift of Sung from Krondor, gives health from the caster to the recipient) and Imperious Passage(which allows the target to ignore the game's already very generous Zone of Control rules). The former's rendered less important by Senwater use not taking a turn, and the latter is less important because... honestly it's just so rarely relevant.    Stepping over a few corpses, we continue down the road to Ormede and... it occurs to me that I actually don't like this. Like, Krondor had a few quests that popped up in specific chapters, but by and large, in any chapter where you could reach a location, you could do all of the sidequests there. There was also relatively rarely updated dialogue for areas as things advanced, excepting the rare actual NPC's with keywords like Brother Marc. The downside was that it didn't feel like the world "reacted" to what you were doing, but the upside was that you didn't need to re-travel a quarter of the gameworld every chapter if you wanted to make sure you weren't missing anything. And for Krondor it was an option, that game had only a few serious shitwrecker fights, like the six-mage battle and, well, any time you were bringing Gorath and Owyn up against the (optional) all-Pantathian fights down near Malac's Cross in the late chapters. Even if you skipped all the optional stuff, sure, you'd have a rougher time, but the game was perfectly beatable that way and you'd still mostly get geared up in time for what you were facing. In Antara, it feels like it's a requirement to do the optional stuff, to re-clear the roads every chapter for training and such. I'm not commenting a lot on the fights, because most of them are mechanically uninteresting, but if the party didn't have all the gear and training they had, they'd be taking a lot more hits, and if they were taking a lot more hits, they'd need money for a lot more Senwater... money they wouldn't have because they hadn't been doing a bunch more grinding against randos on the road. In any case... Ormede!        This lady wants us to find a puzzle chest somewhere in the area for her to add to her exhibit and, try as I might, I had no drat luck finding any. I imagine there's one crammed into a nook in the forest north of Ormede, but finding it probably also requires smashing through eight tiresome Trerang encounters or something.        They also decided to add a racist school to complement the racist kids from chapter 2. Lovely town, I hope someone invades it and burns it down. Twice.    Next up is Levosche, notable for being the first place I arrive at this chapter that buys and sells swords and armor. I promptly start heading up and down the road, hauling everything not leather armor and short swords back to the smith, and end up with an absurd 5500 gold by the time I'm done. Rapiers and chainmail are worth about a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty each to this guy. Aren's college fund secured, I then go around to harass the locals.     This local worthy tells us that the nice people we met in chapter 2 were actually spies! Or possibly might be, anyway.     Chatting up this guy and paying his pittance allows us to sleep in his barn for free as much as we like afterwards which is... I mean I guess it could come in handy rarely? Not like we'll be visiting this part of the world a lot in the future, but it's cheap and...   Someone left behind their stuff inside.   The note seems ominous but is, for now, nothing we can do anything with, while the staff is another one of those "mediocre weapon, but has a special effect on Thrust attacks"-staves which will more or less always roll out to being less effective than just having Aren cast a spell, you know, like the wizard he is. Maybe we should go back and talk to that guy who accused the nice people of being spies before we leave Levosche.      Now, I read helping the Ampersands as the right choice because we get paid for it, they pass us a low-value diamond and our Assessment gets boosted. If, on the other hand, we help out the magistrate, he tosses them in jail and we get no reward(we can then break them out of the town's jail if we feel bad about it, but we still get no reward).  I also feel like this description of the diamond is a reference to something or a common turn-of-phrase somewhere, but neither ring a bell to me.    I skip past Cardone since nothing new's there either, aiming for Waterfork which is probably one of the last few places you'd have expected would be updated for chapter 4 considering that it's also one of the farthest away(if you follow the road). So let's get started interrogating the locals.       The way Shepherds suddenly pop up in every situation when they didn't before, I'm wondering if there was originally intended to be a longer timeskip between chapters 3 and 4, or something of the sort which would explain the change in atmosphere, or whether their participation in the plot was supposed to be more of a slow boil, with the shepherds appearing in chapter 3 and then ramping up to being an important threat later on.   There's no reward for checking up with the guy whose kid we helped, but I always like a follow-up that tells the player that their actions mattered.     This guy is absolutely for real. I just toss him a spare rapier and get about 100 burlas over the base selling price, but if you really wanted to min/max you'd scrounge around for one of the encounters with a really cheap shield or short sword. Still, you should in no way be missing money in this chapter.  It's nice to make people happy. There's one more person to talk to in town.     The Mehrat are the other thing that feel a bit odd. Once again, everyone's talking about them but... aside from that one weirdo spy in Levosche, it doesn't feel like they've actually mattered in the plot so far. Like, I feel they wanted to focus more on it, and have some anti-Mehrat feelings targeting random citizens and stuff, but the anti-Grrrlf stuff ends up basically drowning it out. At least so far. Anyway, after this, I choose to look up past the east side of the central forest, roll west past Ticoro and get to Varnesse.     It's a bit odd that there have been no new spawns here, but I'm fine without fighting any more crabs for the rest of the game.    So just north of Ticoro, we run into this guy. Seen him before? Nope. According to the wiki he should've been in Ticoro, in the Tabernacle of Henne, but I went back and checked the screenshots and he wasn't(maybe he'd have popped up after some later flag was set?). Brightly coloured clothes... some sort of entertainer? Perhaps a clown? Ha ha, no, he's the pope. Or one of the popes, anyway. Each of the three Triune deities have a Hand, the one of Kor is, I think, named at some point, and we never hear of Senaedrin's. This guy? Fellich Marr, the Hand of Henne, who seems to be involved in a lot of stuff. Why the gently caress he's hanging out here, I have no idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEqru3Vg7Ho What baffles me most feels like the intro, because it sounds a lot like the party agreed to meet Fellich Marr here previously. And also just the general reverence when the party doesn't feel... particularly religious previously. I guess they might just be starstruck. I'm also not sure if getting his blessing does anything... since I still have no idea what Henne's blessing actually does. That out of the way... we're continuing to Varnesse.    In chapter 2 it only had some people telling us about a play they saw in... Isten I think it was. In chapter 4, notably more homes are populated.    This one's a handy little boost to repair skill, considering how hard it is to keep swords fixed, I'd have paid ten times that for it. Across from the forge is...   Far as I can tell there's nothing missing here, neither the wiki or the FAQ have anything here. It's just an odd bug.       We'll plant this lady's... plants, after we talk to the last person in town, as the conservatory is finally accessible.   I rag a good deal on Antara, but I do like these interior screens for the most part. There are, amazingly enough, no recycled ones as far as I can tell. Every single store and inn are distinct, and then you get more unique ones like these. Now let's talk to this lady. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JqzFmYn3gU I appreciate her for dunking on Aren good-naturedly. I also really wish Aren had a different speaking sprite, it just looks so wonky, with that cocked head and all. Anyway, plants!  You'd be surprised how long it took me to plant these. For one thing, all the drat botanist tells us is "in the woods!" Which woods? The woods south of Varnesse? North of Varnesse? East of Varnesse? It turns out to be east.    And then, in one of these three screenshots, the planting location is visible. Once again, I only saw it this early when reviewing footage, in actuality I ran in circles for another five minutes before spotting it.    Find three of these holes, pop nudberries into them(which makes the holes disappear), then return to the botanist.    The reward is a five-use Dervish Disc which might actually see some important use now that I have less guys on the field and they have an easier time getting mobbed, since as far as I can tell Antara has none of the summon spells that help break lower-tier Krondor in half.   Next time: We tread new ground in the northwestern province of Antara and maybe advance the plot a little.
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Jan 31, 2022 06:27
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:Thank you so much for this!!! Oh man, Birthright and Outpost. Birthright was absolutely a wild experience, super ambitious and completely busted in ten different idiotic ways. I think that one was just buggy and crashy on principle. Outpost... similarly wildly ambitious, launched with half its core features not functioning and never got the expansion that would've made it a genuine classic... man, I dream of us somehow getting that outpost decades later, still.
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Feb 3, 2022 16:10
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sb hermit posted:I actually think Outpost was a spectacular game, complete in its own right, without the need for an expansion. But this is my teenage brain talking, looking at it with rose colored glasses. Felt like a sci-fi version of Civ except it's just you vs the elements. I quite like how the Panic button did nothing, which is very apt. Oh, yeah, it was a very interesting game(bugs and issues like the rebel colony not actually having a functioning AI aside), but the expansion would've packed it full of more hard-ish sci-fi goodness. More types of plants, native alien life, etc... it would've been more of something I already liked! Which owuld have ruled. I remember playing a cracked copy of Outpost II some years after it came out and remember it as just being a very odd and confused RTS with some good writing.
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Feb 3, 2022 22:15
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Update 10: Cheese and Murder When we last left off, we got done checking out the chapter 4 updates for the province of Ticor, and were about ready to head north from Varnasse to Korus Landing, the last town south of the Glassrock Mountains that we've yet to see.  On the way are a few combats where I test out some spells I haven't tried yet. Here I test out Armorlight on William, it's pretty much Skin of the Dragon from Krondor, gives someone total immunity for up to 20 "phases," which isn't 20 rounds, i.e. one action per character. I have no idea how it's counted in Antara, but it seems to last about five to seven rounds? Also sometimes some characters inexplicably get extra actions, usually Kaelyn. I also test out Emulsify, a new spell that has a hilarious animated icon.  It turns out to be the "lightning orb" spell that Aren got owned with several updates back in the Imazi caves(or I think so, anyway, there are apparently some re-used effects like Armorlight having the exact same effect as the blinding spell). It can technically do great damage and the stat penalties it causes are useful, too, but I've never had Aren manage to land a hit with it, so I prefer having him cast Lightning Bolt and Geyser to avoid wasting his magic.  I was also running a fever from a mild-ish case of pneumonia while recording this update so Aren ended up getting dunked on a lot as this, surprisingly, impacted my decision-making abilities.  The bridge south of Antara is still blocked, so we've got to head farther north.     Korus Landing doesn't have a lot to do, it only has one quest, but it has an awful lot of words.         This guy is desperate for cheese, he'll pay us a whole five burlas a piece(barely any more than it costs to buy), and it would require hauling our asses all the way down to Ravenne to buy any. So hell no we're not fetching his drat cheese.    The sole store in town is a general store, rations and whetstones and such, but the proprietor is chatty, unlike most stores.    Unlike the major, this nice lady will pay us fifty burlas per unit of cheese, which is a fat loving profit. I think you may only be able to trade her one stack(that's all I tried, at least), but if you can feed her more than one stack, she's an infinite money engine.  Plus her glee at loving that guy over is great.          Let's hope we didn't convince this guy to go raring off on an ill-advised adventure and get himself killed some day. In any case, that's all for chatty citizens, profits and quests in Korus Landing. Now, heading north...  Behold! The majestic pass north of Korus Landing! The way Krondor handled this was to have you approach something that looked kind of decent at a distance, then provide some cool text describing how it looked as you got closer and eventually went through. Antara, on the other hand, uh.   Losing the technology to actually have angled mountains and hills was kind of not good.   The north side of the pass otherwise looks much like the south side, but welcome to Chuno. The deep lore for Chuno is that they've got Mehrat and the Waste to their north/northwest, the Waste having been created when a pair of mages nuked each other out of existence in yonks back. Apparently it was pretty much like a nuclear explosion, complete with leaving the residents of Chuno riddled with genetic damage. We won't see many ethnically Chunese in this update, but when we do, we can see that they look a bit rougher around the edges than the rest. Mehrat, meanwhile, kind of keeps posturing at Antara, and Antara postures back, but it's worth noting that for as much as everyone fears Mehrat spies and invasions, I think that one guy down in Levosche is literally the only sign we ever see of it, which makes me wonder if the Antaran government intentionally plays up how aggressive Mehrat is for the purpose of keeping people more worried about an external threat than internal policies. I don't think it's ever elaborated on, but it would be an interesting plot point. Our current goal is Isten, which means that we're going everywhere else first. I think Friole is as far east as we can go, so the plan is to head north and then go around the region clockwise before eventually ending up in Isten. First stop: Everton!    Almost right off the bat, we trip over a chest containing some new stuff.  The Grrlf Bow is another straight upgrade on what we've got so far, but even with that, William can't shoot for poo poo. The slowness of training compared with the lack of trainers to buy training from means that it's really hard to turn William into a competent archer, Kaelyn is really your only good choice for it.  The corrosive arrows are useless, meanwhile, in part because they have an accuracy penalty which makes doubly sure William will never hit with one, but also because they damage equipment which means enemy corpses are suddenly worth less. We're not going to a fight a fight that's unprofitable.    On a whim I decide to visit Everton before Teal, which turns out to be a decent idea.   On the way, I bump into some more enemies guarding a chest, deciding to try out a bold new strategy.  Defending both William and Aren is very effective, but the downside is it's also super-expensive in Senwater since it ends up draining so much of Aren's life that only William is still really able to do anything afterwards, and most enemies up here are armored enough that Aren is our major damage dealer. I also realize I've learned another spell along the way.  At full power this does 120 damage, which is the biggest boom that Aren can generate in one go. Unfortunately, all session, I don't get any real good chances to use it since either someone's looking at Aren, preventing him from casting, or William would be in the blast radius, which would be very bad.   The only notable thing in the chest is the fire arrows which are like a good version of the acid arrows, except still useless to William because his ranged accuracy sucks.   Everton is an unusual town because it's actually got like... more than just a straight road running through town with buildings on either side. People's houses are actually split off into two little side roads set slightly off the main road.     What hasn't really changed since Krondor is that some of the writers were pretty hungry while writing their bits, it feels like every second NPC encounter is about the party getting invited in for food.   Around the corner, a name to remember for in like ten minutes' time.     Another person who's eager for us to get to Isten, good thing for her time only advances when we change chapters, because we aren't getting to Isten within like a month of in-game time. Possibly a month of real-time, too, depending on when I stop having this fever.   Unusually, this merchant has some dialogue when we first talk to him.  And slightly different dialogue if we visit him again afterwards.  I don't think we can ever find his aunt.  He's a nice source of Senwater at this point, but his equipment has the usual issue that most stores in Antara seem to have, which is that by the time you reach them, there's no reasonable way you won't already have gear equal to or better than what they're offering.     We're slightly outnumbered here and Shepherds tend to have decent gear, so I bust out all the stops in part because otherwise I always forget to.  Aren casts Armorlight on himself, while William cracks a Dervish Disc(defense boost) and chug's a Kor's Blood(attack boost), then rushes in to tie everyone up.  The really amazing thing is that the Dervish Disc is actually efficient enough that William doesn't take a single hit during this fight.   Up ahead, a group of loving Trerangs is blocking the way to Teal, so I cast my eyes around looking to see whether I can sneak around them and spot something on the east side of the road.    The area encircled by Everton, Teal, Elona and Burlen is riddled with valleys, containing enemies, rock piles and a few chests. However, I will not be finding all of the contents because...    This place is a miserable loving maze, compounded by the fact that sometimes the map's pencil-narrow crevices are passable canyons, and vice versa sometimes the broad passages on the map turn out to be impassable or simply non-existent in the 3D world. From a quick dive in, in any case, it seems like it mostly just contains low-tier equipment and consumables, nothing I want or need, so I'm just going to head back to Teal and mainly stay on the road.   Teal has something we haven't seen since Krondor, an actual graveyard! Sadly, we're not in the golden age of videogames where every single gravestone would contain a hint, bad pun or reference to a developer, only one of these gravestones can be interacted with.   I absolutely have no idea how or why Aren makes this conclusion. Do popular people have messy gravestones? Maybe whoever lives in the building next door will have something to say about it. They're probably like... a mortuary or something, they'd know about burying people.     Turns out it's actually a school instead. Great location for it, also note the party commenting on "recent events in Teal" that we haven't learned about yet, which is yet another example of Antara not having as many small variations on character dialogue depending on flags as Krondor had.      Ah, there we go, now we kind of know what's going on, apparently the local weapons smuggler trading with the Mehrat got himself killed in a horse-related accident.    Teal also has the first non-dogshit bow store we've found so far. I pick up a stack of Enchanted Arrows because I figure this is the only way William will ever hit a drat thing and on rare occasions I have some need of him firing a bow at stuff. Spoiler: He will still never hit a loving thing I aim him at.   The local inn has a few folks to talk to, first there's a guy on the left.      That totally wasn't shady in any way, now for someone on the right.   This leaves us with three houses to visit, first up is the dead guy's.     On closer reading this conversation is so weird. Why are they referring to him being thrown from his horse as a "despicable deed" when it just sounds like a riding accident? Why are they talking about "bad ka," which as far as I'm aware is something related to the ancient Egyptian religions and which never seems to occur anywhere before or after? And then at the end they mention a break-in which as far as I can tell the priest never brings up. It's like there are several pages cut out of this, or like it was pasted together from several versions or something. Anyway, time for the town bakery.    And then the last house in town.      Okay! Now, without any warning, having talked to everyone in town has Set A Flag and altered something in the game world, allowing us to get farther in the mystery of Brian Castere's murder!    Now this incredibly lovely jpeg is pasted on top of Brian's grave. It's not even loving aligned, what the gently caress. Let's poke it.    So someone already dug this coffin up to loot it... and then completely missed the one thing to loot, which we then looted? Whatever, let's follow the map to a vague bump in the ground.    A key! If you're perceptive you already know what it's for, since we've already had a locked door described as "reddish" not long ago in Everton, but before we head to it, we should head back to Castere's house.     Our second hint at where the key fits is that "GF" also matches the initials on the locked door in Everton and it's super-obvious now that this guy killed Castere for shady smuggler reasons. Let's go break into his house.    Couple new items in here! Also less than 500 gold. Note this, less than 500 gold.  Necklace items use a separate slot from ring items, but they're super rare and, in the case of this one, also super useless. All the Lucky Charm does is boost your gambling skill which means it might trick you into thinking that it's anything more than a way to lose money at taverns.  Brian's journal boosts spell training in the "Movement" type by 5, which is nice but not huge. And then there's a letter. As I pick it up, though, I accidentally read the wrong document in my inventory.       I feel like this accurately encapsulates what feels like several different directions Antara is being dragged in. On the one hand you have people who just want to do Krondor MkII, then you've got people who want to do a wacky high-magic setting("insurance doesn't pay out if you get resurrected!") and then you have what feels like some folks wanting to do something like an Italian peninsula filled with inter-province/town feuds, politics and mercenary companies going up against each other.  The actual letter is a bit less interesting. Let's stick our heads outside and...   Get ourselves ambushed by Fayle.  Mechanically Fayle is just a generic swordyman, but since we can't just freeze him or Five Finger Death Punch him like Navon in Krondor, he's actually marginally dangerous since he has an absurdly high defense stat of 75 or so.  Which means that William would at baseline have barely a 50% chance to hit him starting off, thus I have Aren load Fayle down with Tortoise Bind and Unseeing Eye.  Even so, William barely lands a single hit and the fight is instead sorted by Aren running up and dropping Fayle with multiple Static Discharge casts(it would've been smarter to hit him with lightning bolts, so not sure why I did that), and eventually he goes down.   As an odd thing, his corpse drops across the street in front of someone else's house. Not that it stops me from looting his body and heading over to the blacksmith to sell his stuff, triggering some new dialogue.      We didn't find 500 Burlas in Fayle's house! I also have no idea why this dialogue is triggered by killing Fayle rather than just... always being an option of some sort as soon as you hear the shopkeeper got ripped off. What's more interesting is that he gives us a suit of 100% Montari Chain as a reward for it(and does not, in fact, restock his store in any way), which means that he gave us a 1500-gold suit of armor for 500 gold, to restock his store with, rather than just selling the 1500-gold suit of armor and using three times as much money. I sure wonder why this guy has trouble in business. Anyway, now we can consider Teal to be done and sorted and continue on the way to Elona, another town about which I'm going to have complaints.    Along the way to Elona, Aren also researches a new spell, Storm. For 30 Stamina, it summons, well, a storm, which strikes a random target for 25 damage every turn for the rest of the battle, targeting only metal-wielders like lightning bolt does. In most battles it ends up doing a decent amount of damage over the duration of the first fight, and is what I'll be starting practically every fight with from here on out unless I need to Armorlight someone at the start of the fight or I'm fighting purely animals or wizards.   I think they tried to have Elona sort of crammed in between trees, give it a sort of "elfy tree-town" feel, but it doesn't really work well for me. Also note that the only shop in town is a jewelry store.      But before we talk to the locals, we have to save some plants! I'll have to remember to visit Korus Landing for our reward before the chapter ends. I'll go poke at the remaining citizens before we leave, though. Also there's an abandoned house here containing another academy pass in case you missed the one in Ticoro.          So the reason I find the jeweler thing so interesting is that these guys are trying real hard to make it feel like Elona is a poorly-attended, slightly, well, poor backwater of the Empire out near the Mehrat border but... maybe then they should've had a fletcher, or a general store or something, not a loving jeweler, which is about as bougie as it gets. It's also a good thing we bought the chest location from this guy, because we'd never have found it on our own.   Never. Ever. Ever.  It takes a slight amount of effort to get the colours here, but some of the symbols still have some faint tinge to them. Red potions, yellow skulls, green tomes, blue orbs. This chest actually challenged me a good deal until I "got" it. Solution: Yellow, Blue Red, Blue Green. I think I spent like 20 minutes on it.   A bit of misc. loot and a new type of shield which, like most other new shields we've found so far, start out so beat up that they're in no way as good as our much lower-tier, but better-maintained shields.    Now we're on the road towards Burlen, the south side of which is lined with canyons and crevices, some of which lead into the same maze network as east of Teal.    Aren gets owned by some bandits a couple of ways along the road, mostly because I'm running low on Senwater and too lazy to loop all the way back to Everton. The cube up ahead is Burlen.   Burlen feels a bit odd since it's supposed to be a rich town, known for being opulent, in fact, but it's also in Chuno, the province that's supposed to be full of poor, irradiated survivors of a magical apocalypse who sit around worshipping trees and are kind of alien to the rest of the Antaran Empire.     The inn has a guy that acknowledges stuff is happening even in places where we aren't.  There's an armor store which sells 100% versions of the tortoiseshell shield we found earlier, I think over this entire game so far I've had shield parries proc maybe five times, so I'm not super eager to pay almost 1000 burlas just to up that to maybe 6 times.  The last thing of note in Burlen is the Pernath Academy. To interact with anything in here other than getting told off by the lady at the counter, we need a ticket either from Elona or Ticoro, at which point she lets us inside. You might think this is a place where we might be able to, say, increase our skills, or learn more magic... but no, the entire place just holds deep lore for the gameworld and naff else.   There are two rooms deeper in the building, first we'll take the door under the stairs.  Every shelf in here is clickable, and each one has multiple books on each... with no clear separation of where each one's click position starts and another ends. So I might well have missed one or two, but here's the big drop of all of them.                    I had no luck finding the ones I missed, sadly. Anyway, backing out of the library, we can also head into the office at the top of the stairs.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUoeJxkgjVI I think this is the biggest piece of info we ever get about the Vell, and also more or less the last point they're really mentioned. They feel like they play into yet another partial Antara theme, the idea of the world being partially post-apocalyptic, but outside of Chuno and the Waste, and the odd mention of the Vell, that never really feels like it's made a big deal of either. The Vell feel more like they're suited for a game like Age of Decadence or something. With that, I don't think we ever have a reason to visit Burlen again. At this point I am boned for resources and decide to loop down to Everton.    On the way down, the one interesting thing that happens is that I run into some actual Chunese for once.  You can see they look kind of messy compared to normal enemies, and oddly enough they're also the only group that has any female members as enemy combatants.  Here I also decide to test out Quicksilver on William and it DOES make him a lot more powerful, but note once again the drain-per-phase, which ends up like 3 or 4 phases per actual action, so it drains him dry relatively quickly if you power it up to the amount where it's notable. During my first try at this, I also discovered something odd(due to my eating poo poo).  As you can see I lose while William is still on his feet, which is because if Quicksilver kills him from health drain, he doesn't actually keel over like a genuine corpse. The fight also illustrates this odd issue where the only real danger in Antara is your own impatience, for the most part. As long as I have the patience, I can always go pick up enough Senwater to be functionally immortal. Like, if the game was more linear, and had no options to loop back to towns, so it suddenly became a lot more about resource/inventory management, that could've done a lot to make things more interesting. Anyway, this is not that more interesting game, sadly, so I'm just talking the walk towards Grandeur. Along the way, I stumble on another Church of Kor.        Since I'm stacked on cash, I decide to bless William's sword since he has trouble hitting enemies and... I have no idea what the blessing actually does. I assume it's a +attack bonus or something, but nothing in the game indicates what it does. It's entirely possible that it does not a drat thing.  Further up the road are some Shepherds which have a couple of notable things about them.  Firstly it's the first time we see a Shepherd mage, I didn't actually think there were any.   And secondly it's the first time we see Shepherd armor, which is apparently unrepairable(? why???) and also not particularly good. I wonder if armor was originally meant to be generally unrepairable and you were supposed to be switching up regularly or whether there was originally going to be some sort of disguise mechanic so you could skip, say, Shepherd fights by wearing their colours.    I kind of wish we saw a port at some point in this game, considering the amount of coastline we get to visit at various points. Just a single pier. Also you might note that the skybox has changed! It's not due to the time of day, or a weather system(Antara doesn't have one), but the eastern part of Chuno just has a different, slightly more ominous and brooding, skybox. I kind of like it.     Grandeur is one of the odder towns in the game. It has no NPC's to talk to, no quests connected to it... nothing unique.  It has a generic Temple of Senaedrin.  A neat-looking tavern.  And a store full of a bunch of new poo poo we haven't seen before.   Necklace of Communion When worn, increases Assessment. The silver loops, each intertwined with its neighbors, were elegant in their simplicity. [Character] traced his/her fingers along one of them and got a brief sense of those around him/her -- as if he/she was inside of them, with a better understanding of their abilities than they likely had themselves. [Character] let his/her finger slide away from the silver and the feeling faded. Carluda's Chain Whoever's wearing it splits the damage they take equally with all members of the party. Kinetic Staff When you hit someone with a "Thrust" attack it hits them with a cast of Emulsify, when wielded also increases Electricity magic by 10 points. Malkere's Serum Increases the wielder's Attack and Defense skills but drains 2 hit points from them per "phase," which once again rounds out to almost 10 per actual action. Of these, I guess the Necklace of Communion might occasionally be useful since if you get lucky(it randomly picks which stats you get to see), you can sometimes tell which target is closest to death and thus worth finishing off, since Assessment is a free action now. The rest... ehhhhhh. I'll pass. I'd rather Aren have a staff he can actually beat people to death with on occasion than once with a niche special function.   With that, we've completed about half the circuit of Chuno and, as I recall it, it's the second half of the circuit that actually has the more interesting stuff. So join me next time as we see whether I remember right and whether not having a fever makes me gently caress up less while playing videogames.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:25
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Xander77 posted:Am I overthinking things, or are "the Wastes were for sure the result of mages frying each other and therefore justify any persecution (not that you see any onscreen)" and "oh yeah, we can totally see that you're the good guys and should be better at murdering" shady af? In any other game, you might be on to something, but, uh. This is Betrayal at Antara, it doesn't do subtext(much).
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Feb 10, 2022 21:36
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Evil Fluffy posted:So are the Vell just Anatara's store brand imitation Valheru? Yes but also no. In the sense that they're a progenitor civilization: yes. Are they very magical? No. Are they evil? No. Well possibly. I don't think we ever learn anything about their ethics. Do their leftover junk and war crimes fuel roughly 99% of the plot in some sense? No.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:26
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Update 11: Fallout New Antara We pick up heading south from Grandeur towards Eastbank. Despite ostensibly being just southwest of the Waste, this is one of the more verdant parts of Antara.    I'm still trying to unpick in my mind why I feel like Antara looks uglier than Krondor despite obviously having more colours and more space and power to play with, graphically. I'm not sure if it's entirely an art design thing, but I can't really place it. It feels like it's often so very close to looking really good.    Eastbank is another one of those little towns where the actual living space is set back somewhat from the main road, which I like. There are even a few people here worth talking to.    drat shame Antara doesn't yet have the legal underpinnings for Tree Law.      So, it might amaze everyone to know that we've already been where this key is for! As far as I can tell there are no loving clues whatsoever to it, I had to look up a FAQ. If anyone can guess it before the reveal, I'll buy you an avatar and title celebrating your vast megamind. Do show your work, though, I won't believe a word of it without a proper reasoning, because I refuse to believe a normal human brain could figure this one out.     The Prophet, and his well, actually do exist down in Camille and we'll be seeing them shortly. The Prophet is an... interesting character and I wonder if he was originally intended to be more central to the plot.    The local store also sells the best staff in the game despite being named the House of Swords. It amuses me somewhat that attacking someone with a carved stick, a literal work of art, is more effective, combat-wise, than a steel-shod staff or any number of magical wizard rods.  The local inn just has the usual rations and resting, no interesting NPC's or even a gambler. Something worth noting, though, is that every tavern in Chuno has the following musical theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY2_T4dweEU It sounds loving eerie! Genuinely what I'd expect in the borders of a magi-nuclear wasteland, though the gameworld outside the taverns doesn't do a lot to present the area as such.     There are very few combat encounters in the Grandeur-Eastbank-Camille-Durst-Friole line, mostly just one, at most two, per location, though some sections actually have none at all. It feels more peaceful than the Ticoro heartland of the empire.    It turns out that the prophet of Camille dwells in this completely unspectacular shack in a little town at the edge of the Waste. Might make you think he's just some sort of huckster, right?    You'd think that giving up a weapon actually used for war, and thus lessening the amount of violence, would be more appropriate for a blessing of peace, but oh well! The Prophet will accept any 100% sword, I knew about this in advance and have thus been carrying around a 100% version of the worst sword in the game, bought somewhere in Ticoro, for this very purpose.    The game is very bad at indicating bonuses given by equipment, but now the Blessed Insurance Policy should provide +5 defense to whoever has it in their inventory. It's the only game mechanical reason to get the insurance down in Imazi and haul it all this way. If you don't have it, the Prophet's blessing is entirely set dressing and doesn't have any mechanical impact. But, yeah, it feels like the churches were supposed to be more plot central or something, considering that you've got this guy living humbly out in the rear end end of nowhere who embodies all the magical powers of the three faces of the Triune without wearing fancy robes or having huge coffers. You'd expect some faithful of Kor or Henne or something to come egg his house or whatever. It also continues to make Kaelyn's atheist streak down in Ticoro even weirder considering that divine magical powers clearly exist outside of the temples, too, apparently just manifesting spontaneously in sufficiently virtuous or chosen people like the Prophet.    The only store in Camille deals exclusively in shields, which is probably the most absolutely useless type of store in the game.    Like in Krondor, we can run across a weirdo selling sips from his well. It works just as well as in Krondor, but there we sadly actually have to pay the price. It's a completely negligible price, mind you, a single sold suit of armor or sword(of which an average encounter will yield six) will usually pay for two drinks. On the other hand we could also just sleep at the inn for a quarter of the price.     Along the way to Durst, I run into a riddle chest.  S-HI-R-A  If you're going around Chuno counter-clockwise rather than clockwise, this might be the first Grrlf bow upgrade you find, so it's not as pointless as it seems. I mean except for the perpetual issue that William can't use bows worth a drat.     Further along, we hit upon another bead chest and... honestly, they're starting to get too complex for me. I really can't figure out most of them in any reasonable time without a guide past this point. I'm not sure whether I'm just a loving idiot or impatient or what.  Solution: Trade in Red-Blue. Trade in Green-Orange. Trade in White-Red. Trade in Yellow-Yellow. Trade in Green-Orange. Trade in Blue-White. Trade in Yellow-Yellow-Green. Trade in Red-Green. Trade in Red-Yellow. Trade in White-Orange-Orange-Green.  The reward is a Frost Band which is a notably better version of Oil. On average Oil gives you maybe a +5 damage due to the random factor, the Frost Band just gives a flat upgrade to damage which ends up closer to a 15 damage increase, which is pretty nice and much more reliable.     Welcome to Durst! I think that short of Briala and Imazi, no other town has as many of its houses actually be interactible and contain someone to talk to, taken as a proportion of the whole.   A new supply of shovels is nice, I've been running out, though I'll note that 19 out of 20 buried caches contain absolute dogshit. Either completely outdated gear or something worth less than the shovel charge spent digging it up, it's got nothing on the nice poo poo you could sometimes find in graves in Krondor. Senwater is 90% of my strategy for winning fights, however, so I'll always take more of that.  The tavern looks cozy except... that trophy on the wall just looks like a giant housecat to me. Anyone else? Is it just me?      Sometimes I don't get the logic of why some one-off NPC's get portraits and others don't. Anyway, her neighbour is more interesting and less stinky.    A human village? Holy poo poo, gang, cool it with the loving racism! Dude's just got a lumpy face, not loving horns or whatever. Goddamn. Also this is the first ethnic Chunese we see and... I think it might be the last one we meet that isn't just some rando we murder and loot on the roads. Let's talk to some more of his neighbours.     I love how when it comes to the Grrrlf, the party is usually the enlightened progressive "naw, seriously, they don't eat human skulls! honest!"-voice, but when it comes to this one guy with a slightly busted-looking face, the party is interrogating everyone with this "DON'T YOU SOMETIMES WANT TO RUN HIM OUT OF TOWN??? JUST ON PRINCIPLE???"-voice while the locals seem to be fine with him. Anyway, the last house before the church is the one we really care about.     True to his word, this guy will give everyone in the party a +5 boost to Melee skill in exchange for a pearl. Despite saying he only needs one pearl, however, you can trade him any number of them, even over multiple chapters. We have access to Ormede where we can buy pearls for about 400 burlas each. We are currently carrying so much money that it's straining the party's inventory. Off-screen I make sure to bump William's melee skill up to its cap of 100.  Doing so also leaves Aren around 80 melee skill and changes my combat tactics up a bit because I can now (sometimes) rely on them hitting things, since enemy defense skill can negate a lot of their newfound advantage. Anyway, the church!   Just another church of Henne except, you see that lady with the blonde hair almost hiding behind the guy in the foreground? She's an interactible NPC! And you actually have to find her to complete this chapter, too! Super cool since her interactive area is easily mistaken for the foreground guy and usually any interactible NPC's in a screen are explicitly facing the party or alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv7eOxLWCFw I'm starting to feel like one of Aren's character traits is that as soon as he's gotten freed from his betrothed back in Briala, he's clumsily hitting on every woman even vaguely near his own age who isn't Kaelyn.    At long last we reach Friole, the second-last town we visit in Chuno and also the farthest east we can travel for now.    This conversation is entirely to get us into the barn which we formerly couldn't enter. We can easily rest, but this barn is Special for three reasons. Firstly, like the barn down in Levosche we can rest here for free.   Secondly, it contains some deep lore.    This is supposed to be a hint that the Feeblepox was unleashed by digging into ancient Vell chambers. Sadly, the chamber mentioned in this particular note can never be found. It was probably intended for a planned sequel that never happened. Lastly, in the next chapter where, surprise, we play as Kaelyn and Raal, Friole and Durst are also accessible, so anything we want the two of them to have, we can leave here, like nice suits of armor, upgraded swords, a small cache of pearls so they can go get themselves trained up, that sort of thing!      There's no mechanical reward for saying hi to these two, so we just get to feel happy on their behalf.   The local store just sells(now useless) buckets and picks, while the inn is... just an inn. Nothing special. Now, I could head for Isten right away, but instead, we now have a bit of cleanup to do. Back south of the mountains we've got to collect our reward from the conservatory in Varnasse, we've got the green key to us and off-screen I have a small fortune in pearls to collect.   Taking the road in the shadow of the mountains back to the pass, I run into some bandits and decide to try out some new spells the party's picked up. Some of them just get looked at, though, due to their being inherently bloody awful wastes of Aren's lifeforce. Firstly there's Adrenaline, which raises the target's Strength by up to 20 points. Sadly it's not quite as busted as in Krondor since damage seems to scale slightly less linearly with strength gained, but it still makes William able to do more damage with swords than Aren can with spells for the first time. Combined with Quicksilver at full power, it also means that most rounds he hands out two hits(which are now very likely to hit because of the training) for a total of ~100 damage every round. Then there's Muscular Decay which does the exact opposite. Antara doesn't have a lot of "big single enemy" fights, which is likely the only place I'd consider using it. Communion wastes a turn displaying all of a target's stats. Great if you're writing a FAQ, less great if you're playing the game to complete it since you just wasted a turn.  Every fight from now on till at least the end of this update is William getting stuck with a max power Adrenaline and then a max power Quicksilver and then going through the enemies like an angry blender.     It doesn't make the combats completely dangerless, though, before the first round is over, in several fights, William's gotten mobbed and almost cut down. After that he rapidly turns the odds around, but the first round can still be scary.       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cteEzMnTGx4 So something interesting and easily missed here is that Naomi actually teaches Aren a new type of magic. Poison magic. It's not very good or useful, but it does seem a bit odd. Why would a kindly, caring gardener-mage know poison magic? Oh well, I'm sure there's nothing at all shady about that. While stumbling around down here, I also tripped over a chest I'd missed up by Korus Landing.    Yellow, Green, Blue-Yellow, Red-Yellow, Blue-Blue-Green, White-Black-Black  The only gain for all that work is a Carluda's Chain with a single charge, though it does show off that it visually gets a sprite with less links as it's spent. Now, has anyone figured out where that key we found in Eastbank goes? The green one? No? It's used here in Korus Landing.  The cheese-hungry local official has one of the few houses in the game with two doors, and they actually lead to different things. The green key is for his back door.    This out this is what happened to the ancestral tree of that poor guy in Eastbank. Not that the game ever deigns to tell you this. Now, back to Eastbank...    It took me about ten minutes real-time to find the loving stump he was talking about, because I expected it to be in any way different or to stand out compared to other sprites of stumps and the like.      Idol buried. Dare we hope for a reward?   At least it's a reward. It'll probably get me like 400 gold at best which is... kind of trivial for anything but buying food and senwater at this point. Before I head on up to Isten, I also want to take a stop at Elona to see how much that friend of Naomi's is appreciating the help we provided for his garden!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oZXW77I8uk This is super easily missed since you never have a reason to go back and check on this guy. I guess he should be thankful that the evil poison mage he apparently has a feud with just cursed him with a fart joke rather than killing everyone at the party with poisoned vegetables.Now we can finally move on to Isten and advance the plot!    The road to Isten is, I think, supposed to be feeling kind of mountainy with the boulders/hillocks to either side of the road. Along the way, though, we run into this corpse who's carrying a novel's worth of letters on him, so strap in for someone's completely pointless life story.                So you've got a lady who becomes a nun because of some family fuckery, she has a kid, keeps in touch with the kid's father via letters. The lady then dies when the couple are finally to be reunited... and then the dad also dies along the road before getting there and learning she's dead, leaving basically just the kid by herself. I guess we should, uh, deliver these letters or something so the nuns aren't left wondering when the dude's gonna show.    Good thing we were already heading in that direction, I suppose.   ...I had also totally forgotten we were heading here to help out that lady in Everton. Good thing the game remembers these things for me so I don't have to.   "Oh well, maybe it was for the best that he died horribly while travelling rather than ever being a father to his child." What the gently caress, lady? Isn't your sect supposed to be all about compassion and caring? I swear everyone in Antara is some kind of sociopath. Whatever, let's grill the locals in Isten and try to remember why we were coming here in the first place.   Oh, yeah, we were coming here to question an actress because her son had joined a fascist death cult and maybe he could point us to their hideout rather than attacking us on sight like all the other idiot death cultists do.        I think you can find this lady's chest and get the tickets from there, but I never had any drat luck locating it, so I had to do it the other way where, unbelievably, the Lucky Charm I berated as useless actually came in handy.       The other way to get tickets is to roll the dice against this guy over and over again until you score enough "wins" to clean him out and win the tickets. Zero player involvement, just mash the random rolls over and over again.     Like it could at least have been like Krondor where if we wanted to own someone at Chess to complete a quest, we needed to find a cheaty-rear end secret move to bust out against them. Time to interrogate the rest of the town and then head to the amphitheater.        This guy's treatise boosts the party's Haggle skill by a not-inconsiderable 7 points. I like his next door neighbour more, though.       And this guy breaks us into Charm magic and... I want to complain here. I generally do, but specifically here. We've learned Charm and Poison magic this update, each of which are fully-fledged skills running the gauntlet from 0 to 100 points and each of them only have one or two spells related to them at all. I think we've got, in total, something like... 20 different skills that make up our different magic types, and yet each of them affect barely one or two spells, and then only in the sense of having a breakpoint that allows learning the spell. It's such a stupidly overcomplicated system for such minor payoff. Graaahhhhh. Badly considered mechanics make LP'er angry.    And that's the last chatty person in Isten, now we can go not watch a play.        Once again I can't help but note that they totally COULD make nicer looking things, they just didn't in so many cases.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR3EHnFTeMU So her kid joined the death cult and then un-joined the death cult before running off to Durst. At least, I suppose, we've cleared the roads there already. Also is it just me or is she one of the first voice actors for this game that actually feels like she's trying to be a character rather than just read the script? The only one with some cadences and speech tics and, you know, more natural-sounding speech? Some speech with personality? It may just be me, but I felt struck by how, while not the best VA I've ever heard, she felt so much better than the rest of the ones in this game.    Next time: we go waterboard her idiot kid and then we bust this cult. Surely it'll be simple to solve.
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Feb 15, 2022 01:01
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Update 12: Big Birds and Racially Motivated Violence This'll be a comparatively short update since there was less left of chapter 4 than I expected. We start out heading southeast from Isten to Durst.    There are a few Masliths along the way since I skipped them by circling out of their aggro radiuses coming up, but I decide to wipe them out this time around since I realized how much easier Adrenaline makes it. I also got two new spells while in Isten which I will never, ever use.   There's all of one(1) charm effect in the game, and I'd never even know who could bust it out ahead of time or who they could target, anyway. Poison weapons... slightly more of a worry, I suppose? But I could also just use the turn to cast Storm, Adrenaline, Quicksilver, Call Lightning, Geyser or any number of spells that would actually kill any theoretical enemies who could poison me faster.   William's one-shotting these idiot lizards now. Early on they'd take like 30 damage a piece, and dodge half the swings aimed at them, so it would take six or seven swings to put one of them down.    On the way to Durst I also stop by Everton to cash in that one quest there.    Oh boy, I bet her house is going to be full of an exciting volume of gently caress all.    The exciting contents of her broom closet. I'll also note that at this point the party's hoarded a good number of gems and such which, off-screen, I offload at the jewelry store in Elona. It turns out that even an 80% sapphire or other gem stone barely yields as much as a suit of chainmail. They do also take up a lot less inventory space, but if they were more valuable, as in Krondor, they might serve as an alternative to pure liquidity now that our wallet has a size limit.    In Durst, we'll obviously look for Simon at the temple.  It's important that we get blessed before talking to Jhana, since otherwise she'll basically just stonewall us and not tell us about Simon.        Good thing we already met the Party Pope and know where he's hanging out. Time to head back to Ticoro.    Lucky for us he hasn't moved an inch and will be here at all times or day, in all weathers(if Antara had any weathers...), waiting for us to hassle him with minor questions.       And Fellich points us off down to Ravenne... good thing he's being so helpful.    Coming down past Melay I see something odd on the road. It looks weird at a distance, like some sort of gross ghoul thing. Not quite human proportions...  ...are you a bird? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xxg7LToSgo This encounter is entirely optional but is one of the rare few chances we have in the game to learn something about the world's fourth sapient species, the Trkaa(the other three being humans, Grrrlf and Montari). I'm not sure if they're flightless birds or can actually fly, but they're apparently who you pay to deliver messages when it has to go fast. You might remember that Scott mentioned them in chapter 1 related to the feathers in his hat, which he's apparently earned by telling Trkaa stories they haven't heard before. Someone obviously had fun with these and the Montari speech tics, though.    Time to pry Simon out of his house and give him noogies until he tells us where the fascists are hiding.   It chafes my balls unreasonably that they just used generic mercenary sprites for these supposed Imperial Soldiers.  The cramped battlefield prevents me from getting all the usual buffs on William before the soldiers get all up in Aren's face.  Not that it helps them much, it just delays their deaths slightly. That poor archer in the back just kept shooting at him all fight and missed every single shot, which was somewhat funny. But it did kind of make me wish that the enemies' equipment was more visible. Like, so you could see who was an archer, or who was wearing stronger and weaker armor, so you had some clues as to who to prioritize for buffs/debuffs/armor-ignoring magic damage.   Breaking into Simon's house again, we find one of his letters explaining where he's at.  Weird that someone knew where we were going, though, maybe it was that drat bird who tipped them off.    Simon now exists in Levosche, but so does an NPC that wasn't around before and is one of the... weirder encounters in the game.     As far as I can tell, there's no... resolution to the fact that this lady is apparently a mass-murdering enchantress. We can't stab her, get trained by her, undo her enchantment, get tasked by her to do anything. She's just... here.  Anyway... here's Simon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpjPGmrdWWY Simon quit the Shepherds after beating a Grrrlf child to death, not after his buddies told him they were planning to kill children. Now we're hoofing it back to his garden in Ravenne to collect his Shepherd amulet...    Good thing no one's going to try to stop us in any way beyond having sent these four poor idiots to die at our hands.  The amulet we've just picked up is the exact same one we started the game with, which disappeared on us at the end of chapter 3, probably confiscated by Caverton as evidence. It does raise the question of why we couldn't have picked one up off any other other dozens of Shepherds we've stabbed so far. Oh well, we're headed off to Ticoro, again, and then north into an area we couldn't enter in Chapter 2 since the party would just say they had a vague feeling it wasn't time to go there.    It makes me realize that we haven't actually seen a lake in the game before except for that one underground one.    This chapter ends with a puzzle.  Our clues: the amulet itself and, on the back "R, L, R". You flip it right(clockwise), left(counter-clockwise) and right again to indicate the correct symbols. What are the correct symbols? They're actually carved on the shepherd on the amulet's staff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKdiENn1lk This contains the end of chapter 4(including the amulet solution), the start of chapter 5 cutscene and inexplicably also the first fight of chapter 5. Next time: we actually see chapter 5 and what Kaelyn and Raal are up to.
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Feb 16, 2022 22:37
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Psion posted:Retroactively, the BaK book-game mismatch bothers me a lot less now that I've seen Antara Hell, practically everyone in this setting is clean-shaven, too! Where are the giant waxed ren faire moustaches? I think Lord Caverton is the only man we've seen in this setting with some flamboyant facial hair. Hypocrisy posted:Holy moly a talking ostrich...is what I was going to say but that enchantress encounter sticks out in my mind more. The yard is full of bones too? How does it just end there? I guess after having killed like a hundred people in the last few weeks as well as assorted crabs, chimpanzees and monitor lizards, William and Aren are starting to be pretty blase about murder. "I'm sure she had a good reason."
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Feb 17, 2022 11:35
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Update 13: They Made It Worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKdiENn1lk  So! Last chapter ended with William and Aren infiltrating the Shepherds' headquarters, and so, right at a dramatic point, we're skipping to Kaelyn and Raal heading off to visit her dad and getting intercepted by a racist hit squad.  It's slightly odd that we're spawned looking in the wrong direction, with the Shepherds not technically blocking our way(if we turn around and move, we're still within their aggro radius, though), and we can't even really go the direction they're in because they're practically right on the edge of the area we're allowed to explore in this chapter, being a rectangle that's roughly got Grandeur as its upper left and Durst, Friole and Darvi as its lower right edges.   Kaelyn is as we left her, same inventory, same skills, and by default she inherits 50% of the end-of-chapter-3 burlas and food the party has.   Raal is... he's pretty chunky, which is the best thing about him. High hit points, high strength, but, despite being a staff-wielder, not a mage. For this chapter we only have two physical combatants, and only one of them has any kind of trick(in the form of being able to use bows). With Antara having much less in the way of combat expendables(no Horn of Algon-Kokoon, no scare-enemies-away potions, no Eliaem Hearts, etc.), it makes combat a lot less interesting and also... a lot more painful. To illustrate, let's go beat up those racists that just threatened us.  If this was William and Aren, Aren would buff William with Adrenaline, then Quicksilver, and he'd killing one per turn, possibly more if Aren softened some up with magic. Kaelyn and Raal, however...     Even ignoring the Pearl Trainer Guy, Kaelyn and Raal start out about 20 points of Melee below William, which means 20% less chance to hit enemies than he had, and he was doing plenty of missing already. Hell, even with the trainer he's not guaranteed to hit anyone. I only tucked away 4 pearls for them in Friole, but God, I wish I'd done the work to stash away 8 pearls. On top of that, they do miserable damage against armored enemies. Raal roughly does as much damage as William would, without Adrenaline, while Kaelyn both has lower Strength, has a lower-tier weapon(still a rapier) and lacks the combat skill, once she gets a broadsword, to use the most damaging attack(overhead slash) without missing most of the time. It makes the fighting something of a slog.    In the end I win the fight, though, Kaelyn and Raal have a quick chat and we get to pick over...  The corpse. As in singular, because when you have a harder time hitting enemies and do less damage with the hits you do land, they also get more chances to run the gently caress away. At least this dickhed was carrying a breastplate we can toss on Raal so he isn't still wearing leather armor, he might be chunky, but he's not chunky enough to survive multiple stab wounds without decent armor.     The first order of business is to head east to Friole and the barn, in addition to the pearls there I had also stashed a broadsword(which Kaelyn finds on the way anyway...). If I knew how dogshit she'd be at fighting, though, I would have made sure to bless it at a Temple of Kor first, since the borders on the party's exploration in this game prevents me from getting to the one Temple of Kor I know is in the area, son of a bitch. In the Friole inn there's also a free Grrrlf Bow under one of the tables, which is an upgrade for Kaelyn, though arrows still do comparatively negligible damage. Using the pearls just barely get Kaelyn and Raal to where William was before he used pearls himself. Friole has no updates, but Durst has one change.      There's another lost kid to find. I'll get around to this before the end of the update. At this point I'm also not aware that I can get east enough to get to Darvi, nor know what shops it has, so instead I loop around westwards through Camille and Eastbank to sell off armor and bulk up Kaelyn and Raal's inventory a bit. There's not a lot for them to buy, not even Kor's Blood, Dervish Discs or anything of that sort, so it's mostly a fund for food, Senwater and blessing gear on the off chance that there's a temple around that I don't know about.    Past Grandeur's walls, on the right, there's a mountain pass leading south. If you try to enter it in chapter 4, Aren and William bitch and complain about not wanting to get off track and refuse to head there, but Kaelyn and Raal will happily head that way as it leads into the Ridgewood where Kaelyn's dad and a bunch of Grrrlf live.     There are a few generic enemies on the way and also...  A chest. Now, you might think, "oh, it's just a locked chest, full of trash," and yes! That's right! But Kaelyn smashes away at the lock with her lockpicks and, predictably, picks up a bit of lockpicking training doing so.  Oh did I say "a bit," I meant "it instantly teleported her from 20 lockpicking to 70." I have no idea if this particular chest is bugged to gently caress, or if the "training multiplier" for lockpicking is just set insanely high for this chapter, or perhaps for Kaelyn(since Aren was marginally better than the others, I had him do all the lockpicking in chapters 1 through 4), or maybe the game is just loving weird. But I guess Kaelyn knows how to crack chests like a pro, now!     I think this body of water is meant to be the ocean to the north rather than a large lake, but I'm not sure. In any case, we're about to enter the Ridgewood proper, and that's when we encounter an NPC! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFckd3-SBYQ It's the leader of Raal's Grrrlf tribe! Here to tell us what's going on, which is that Kaelyn's dad is: gone. And evil ghosts are: eating people's souls and turning them into murderous zombies, which explains a lot about why everyone keeps trying to kill us for no obvious reason. I also just... I cannot deal with the loving Grrrlf speech tics and their terms and stuff. It just... it his some sort of deeply annoying note for me. I think it's because it feels halfway between furry roleplay and some sort of pastiche of an aboriginal group(possibly Native Americans?). The smart move would be to peace out and hope Kaelyn's dad shows up and, if not, hiring a boat and moving to somewhere not infested by mind-eating ghosts. Unfortunately Kaelyn and Raal are not smart and instead decide to keep going.   Also despite what the Big Grrrlf said, the Wraiths are super-visible, big glowy fuckers, you have to really be barrelling ahead without looking around to bounce into one. However, he's right that we can't do a drat thing about them yet so for now a lot of the Ridgewood is inaccessible to us.   The next fight we run into is mildly interesting, not because of its contents, the brain-wiped husks in the Ridgewood fight like anything else except I don't think they ever retreat, but because of a bit of dialogue afterwards.      Firstly, Raal, everything we run into randomly attacks us anyway. It can never be negotiated with and a lot of things fight even when wildly outmatched. Secondly, while some of the husks in the Ridgewood are just "peasants," i.e. carrying dogshit weapons and trash tier 1 armor, these guys were actually wearing plate and carrying around big swords, so either they're not just random farmers or farming in Antara is a high-risk job.    Heading southwards, I actually reach the end of the Ridgewood and arrive in Darvi, revealing to me that it's actually accessible, which I didn't know. Time to go poke around and see what Darvi has to offer.   It's one of the rare towns that has two shops, and one of them is thoroughly useless, just another store full of overpriced books(including the one that doesn't teach you jack poo poo) we've already read.     I couldn't find any wine for this guy, but apparently it only provides a single shieldstone, so I'm not very torn up about it. The house behind his, though, is slightly more interesting.      I like that it actually gives Raal a bit of personality beyond "slightly congested generic native." Don't get used to that, though, he doesn't really have much personality outside of "I am Grrrlf" in most interactions.    I've not been having much luck finding this guy's book, but apparently it gives a large Assessment buff if you read it, and just some arrows if you give it back unread, so it's objectively a better choice to just read the drat thing and toss it in a ditch.   The other store in town is only worthwhile because it sells Senwater, everything else is stuff that you literally can't get to it without already having or having a superior version of.      Any stat boost is better than no stat boost, but archery is a lot less useful when it's only Kaelyn and Raal, as it prevents Kaelyn from being outside of the big melee scrum where she can snipe wounded enemies.    Right next to Darvi is the rickety bridge to the swampy province of Ghan. We can't go there without getting complained at so I guess we shan't. Before heading back into the Ridgewood, I decide to clear the road between Friole and Darvi and rescue that lost kid. Along the way I run into a few Shepherds guarding a chest and something... odd, happens.  One of the Shepherds tries to fire an arrow at Kaelyn and it quite literally backfires. Aside from crashes, the game's usually been relatively un-buggy(aside from the Lockpick skill thing...), so this one was something of a surprise.The chest they were guarding also has something new.   So, this bow fires two arrows at once, as one attack, at the cost of a worse both damage and accuracy mod than the Grrrlf Bow. It means that Kaelyn can now actually do non-negligible damage, but since she's also lost access to places where she could buy Enchanted Arrows, and the +damage fire and corrosive have a nasty accuracy malus, it's more of a sidegrade than an outright upgrade since bows are never super-accurate, even at their best, though I think the game displays their accuracy wrong in combat.    Heading north of Durst into the Waste feels... odd. It's supposed to be a big hellblasted zone, but it's just sort of crammed in between Grandeur, Durst, Eastbank, Camille and the Ridgewood, all relatively verdant areas. Like, I'm fine with a mage apocalypse creating a verdant hellhole, rather than a blighted hellhole, but that's not the mental image that the name "The Waste" conjures up. In any case, the entrance is guarded by a few generic miscreants, but once we get inside, we actually reach a new type of enemy!   Like how Trerangs are just a primate .gif hit with a blue bucket tool in MSPaint, Fire Wolves are just, well, wolves, hit with a red colour bucket. They're not particularly strong and do thankfully underwhelming damage, but predictably have an unusual ace up their sleeve.  Cool, right? I wish I could tell you how devastating it was, but every single use of it missed Kaelyn. I think something like ten shots or so all whiffed her, completely absurd. I could imagine it being the same as the spell that uses the same projectile, which would mean probably 20 to 40 damage, depending on the power level.    Just around the corner, another pack of Fire Wolves are patiently sitting around poor Toddy, probably considering doing something awful to him shortly before the heat death of the universe.    And now back to Durst.    A book, hm?   Reading it gives +3 to Melee, Scouting and Stealth skills. I mean, I'll always take a skill bonus, but it's pretty minor. With that sorted, it's time to head back to the Ridgewood. Maybe if we range a bit off the main path we'll find a clue or two.      Alright, the North of the Ridgewood. The Ridgewood is sort of L-shaped, with one end at Grandeur, the corner above Darvi and the other end east of Darvi. Since this cabin is near Darvi, the "north" could be either along the horizontal or the top of the vertical, I check the former first.     No secret hideouts here, but plenty of wraiths and their thralls... including one hanging around a suspicious stone circle.   I also get ambushed by some Grrrlf husks, which are exactly the same as human husks. I'm als pretty sure they're literally a slightly colour-shifted Raal sprite. Time to check out the vertical.    It's honestly perfectly easy to miss the entrance to Kaelyn's dad's lair, especially as a lot of paths are cut off by wraiths, but here it is, hidden behind this little cluster of trees.    Despite visibly being made from stone, an artificial structure, it's full of weird twists and turns and some pretty weird textures besides.    But, weirdness aside, it's really just a twisty corridor with no enemies or loot which leads to a large open area within which...  We find an NPC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpVRz7ybV_0 In my opinion they hosed this up, and they hosed it up bad. They wanted to have both an emotional reveal(that we have really not spent enough time with anyone involved in it to earn) and a huge loving lore dump. Plus the game's never really made "being a wizard" feel special enough that it seems like a big twist this guy is one, especially when said twist is revealed the moment we meet him. Anyway, the Cliff's Notes: Kaelyn's dad accidentally killed her mom with bad magic, never told Kaelyn. Never even told her he was a wizard. Cat is now out of the bag and Kaelyn isn't happy. Wraiths are from an alternate dimension where they breathe magic energy, should not be able to survive on Ramar for long. Kaelyn's dad will jazz up our weapons so they can cut open the sheath of magic energy that the Wraiths breathe, thus allowing us to kill them.    So now all we gotta do is purge the Ridgewood of extradimensional invaders before they spread and eat the brains of everyone in Ramar. Sounds simple enough. I'm sure it can wait an update, though.
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Feb 21, 2022 22:12
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Vanigo posted:but fire wolves are bugged. Their flame breath works off of spell accuracy, but as non-spellcasters they have no spell accuracy, so their hit chance is always 5%. Oh my God, I thought it might be something insanely stupid like this but I thought it was too idiotic to even voice as a theory. That's wonderful.
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Feb 22, 2022 02:15
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Update 14: Get Into My Swamp So, let's get back to it. We now have the Wraithslayer enhancement on our weapons and can actually go beat up some ghosts. One thing I'll note before this happens, though, is that Kaelyn's dad is a filthy liar, the enchantment never dissipates, either that or it takes a lot more battles and wasted time than I spent. I was nervously checking it before every fight just in case I was wandering into one I couldn't complete, but it never wavered.   Now that we can actually hurt them, wraiths are completely unthreatening. As far as I can tell they have no special attacks, they aren't even armor-ignoring like magic is. In fact they do insanely piddling damage, like 14 and 15 points per attack... when they hit, because they also tend to miss a lot, and about three attacks will usually take them down. They do have a neat-looking death animation, though.  There are four wraiths in the Ridgewood, three of them have a couple of Grrrlf or human husks guarding them(no mages, no threats), while the fourth is alone. Only one of them is marginally interesting.    Due to hiding out in this circle of stones and having one of these rare long-and-narrow battlefields, which I wish there were more of. They're some of the only ones where the game's very lenient zone-of-control rules might be useful and leveraged in some fashion. Anyway, once they're all dead...  Kaelyn actually points out they're all dead, a nice touch, so you won't be wandering the woods for the next few hours wondering where the last drat ghost is. Obediently, we head back.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjdJlW6apKs Cliff's Notes: "Yaaay, we killed them all." "Anything weird out there?" "Oh, yeah, circle of stones. Also I'm cool with you again, dad." I took up this guy's chapter end video rather than posting my own recording of the conversation since he included it anyway. The chapter end animation picks up pretty much where we left off with William and Aren, wandering into a spooky cave.    A spooky cave full of Shepherds! And a few corners have some crabs as well. You can actually somewhat gently caress yourself over here as you can't back out of the cave and the locals are carrying barely any rations and rarely any Senwater, so if you came in here with just a few sandwiches and nothing for healing, you could be pretty proper hosed. Still, I'm good on both, so the caves resound with carnage and get a new, red paintjob.     You can explore the caves pretty thoroughly by just using the old left-hand-wall rule, since there are very few places where the caves loop back on themselves, they're pretty linear for the most part. You want to keep going until you hit this staircase.   You could probably brute force this, each red stone has a state of either pressed or unpressed, order doesn't matter. How many possible solutions would there be? I think about 150-ish or something without bothering with the maths? Still, the game does actually hide a way to find the right solution if you keep going on.    I don't think any NPC's ever talk about this guy, the only places he's mentioned are in one item description and probably also in the manual's lore though I can't be bothered to read it again to check. M-AL-K-E-RE  We bring this lantern back to the wall puzzle and...  It indicates the correct buttons to push. It honestly feels kind of dogshit as a puzzle. It can either be brute forced or we can fetch an object that just tells us the solution. I prefer things that require me to invest a little bit of brainpower.     On the far side are a few actually room-looking rooms containing some more shepherds, you'd figure this was indicating we're getting close to their inner sanctum, and we are, except, uh.   The inner sanctum is actually in the caves beyond the actual structures, for some reason. No don't loving ask me why, it's stupid as all hell.     On the far side of some corpses(they weren't corpses before we got there, though), is this oblivious fuckwit who hasn't heard or noticed any of the violence going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVdKe9W_xQI It's Gar Warren! Leader of the Shepherds! He is an absolutely stupid motherfucker who wanted to kidnap the Consort(his first plan was Princess Aurora but she was too well-protected) so he could force the Emperor to sanction a full-on race war against the Grrrlf. But then his pet wizard just casually teleported the consort away to someone on the far side of a portal. What an absolute jackass. Sadly there's no "kill him and laugh"-option, so instead we turn around and go on our way, except...     Okay, turns out Gar's pet mage did not in fact leave with the Consort but instead chose to hang around???? And decided that she, on her lonesome, can take us on. Let's see how that works out for her, shall we?   Whoops turns out it gets her loving one-shot by William because she decided to show up to a fight in melee range without wearing armor and without winning initiative. A fatal mistake on her part. No sooner does she drop to the ground, however, than...     I'm unsure whether the cops just happened to find the place shortly after we did, or whether they were tracking us ever since Ravenne and simply took a smoke break outside the cave because they knew we'd cut half the Shepherds to ribbons and spare them the work. Of course, not being total morons, our boys decide to peace out before the police pick up them, too.   They barely get two steps before a cutscene takes over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9diBBnd1cwA Trying to chase down Gar Warren, they get lost in the caves but stumble their way outside. They reason that the Consort must have ended up with Ghanish mercenaries and... wouldn't you know it? It turns out they've actually wandered out into Ghan. This is an earlier screenshot of the map, but we emerge just within a short walk of Torlith.   And next to one of the rare stone piles that are worth digging into since it doesn't contain just another shovel or a single chicken leg or something.   Instead it's got two unique books.  One offers a small boost to stealth, though Aren and William still flub nine out of ten ambush attempts(doesn't help that you have to be almost right up in an enemy's rear end in a top hat to attempt it, and sometimes their aggro radiuses simply prevent getting that close without combat starting).  The other offers a small boost to Aren's electric skill, though I'm not sure if he still has any lightning spells left to learn.    Moving west to Torlith we encounter the most devastating enemy in the game: this loving road. It requires a bit of explanation. The low-lying swamp areas are impassable and un-enterable. This road is shittily made and only barely wide enough for the party, causing them to vibrate wildly left and right when using it. It will, in fact, vibrate them reliably into the low swamp which they can't escape from. Do not use this road, go around it and enter Torlith from the grass instead.    Torlith is notable for every building being interactible.        This is actually a chest we can find and the reward is... maybe worth it?        This one originally confused me a bit, but it turns out this is actually the rock pile we spawned right next to on leaving the tunnels and already cracked through.     I feel like this is a reference to something, but I don't get it. We also never see Ghan again after this chapter, so unless Betrayal in Antara gets a much-delayed sequel one of these days, we'll never know where they were going with this.    The last thing of note is that the store in Torlith sells the top-tier suit of armor in the game, it doesn't get better than this.  Weirdly enough, if you enter this little crossroad from Torlith, you can still get through, just do not use the part of it that's after the right turn up there. That's the one that kills you.     I suppose it's nice that it acknowledges the fact that the two parties are basically right next to each other, but this adds pretty much nothing. Anyway, let's go east and see what we can find in Ghan.   Mostly what we find are corpses that contribute to the "dress Aren up funny"-fund.  We already have the password here from the dad in Torlith, so we can crack the chest, it doesn't contain anything we want, though, just some worthless jewelry and plants.     The score is a Circlet of Senaedrin which is pretty eh. I also go get some Montari Plate for Aren.  It makes him look like he's halfway through a GWAR cosplay.     Since I've got some money left over and there's a temple of Kor here in the swamp, I go get the Montari Plate blessed.   It goes a long way towards rendering Aren invincible towards anything non-magical hitting us at this level, it knocks most attacks with broadswords and rapiers, still the most common weapons(and frankly I don't know if they ever upgrade beyond that), down to doing like five damage or so.   I get started on clearing the road east towards Keth, and thankfully all the enemies tend to be wearing platemail which yields good amounts of money when I haul it back to Torlith where no one blinks an eye at being sold blood-dripping armor.  Most of the enemies are just packs of generic fighters, though one group does drop this bow which I'll never use, since the Speed Bow does better damage-per-turn anyway and the Grrlf Bow can actually hit things well.    That's when I run into these pricks.  It starts out pretty normal, William gets his buffs on, starts chopping and then...  Yeah, fireballs are loving SCARY.  It doesn't stop William from carving everyone to giblets, of course, but it does mean Aren gets to spend a few days while his eyebrows and skin grow back thanks to massive Senwater infusion. Oh and these guys drop an incriminating and incredibly stupid note.   Why would you write a legally binding contract for an illegal venture, that accomplishes nothing but implicate everyone involved in some insanely shady poo poo? I swear everyone in Antara is suffering from lead poisoning. Their armor is also enough to afford Montari Plate for William.  Unlike Aren, between his pose, the sword and the shield, he actually looks like he means business in it. Returning to the scene of the crime, i.e. one of the many, many violent stabbings left behind in the trail of William and Aren, I happen to glance into the swamp to the south.   Being very wise, I understand that these glowing dickheads are Lightning Bugs and will probably fry my dumb rear end in seconds if I give them a chance to, thus, precautions are to be taken!  I frankly don't know how much Grounding Wire affects lightning damage, but I think it probably reduces it by between 50 and 75%.   They're VERY trigger happy and pretty beefy, able to eat two 100+ damage hits from William before going down. Thanks to the Grounding Wire, their zap blasts only do 10 damage, but I can only imagine how much worse it would be if they actually landed a hit without it. With the Grounding Wire, they just require a bit of patience, though they're some of the rare enemies that semi-reliably dodge William's attacks. What the hell is their defense rating? Assessment won't tell me.   It turns out they've been guarding a sinister goblin man, let's interrogate him.       At this point it's not super obvious, but guessable that you need to pass him a roll of Grounding Wire, so I do just that. The one I was using didn't have a lot of charges anyway.  As thanks for helping the mysterious goblin fella, we get...  A rating in Cold magic for the first time and.  His rather disappointing beatstick, the Grrrlf staff is still better nine times out of ten for when Aren needs to break some ankles the hard way. It's tempting to get out of the swamp before more Lightning Bugs show up, but there's also a coded chest behind the goblin.   CO-N-SU-L  It yields the first damaged shield that's enough of an upgrade that it's actually better than the mostly intact shield William is already carrying! I appreciate this further step towards tankiness, even though shields are an annoying purely-random mechanic. I'm genuinely not a big fan of how they work.     There are a few more Lightning Bug swarms and bandits on the way to Keth, but William and Aren arrive without too much trouble, though Senwater supplies are running a bit low because of the fireball accident earlier.   I believe we can find this guy's wine in one of the Ghanish towns, but I don't know which, so we'll see if I come across it. There's also a chest behind this guy's house.   So you're looking at this poo poo, right? Maybe working it out on paper to avoid digging yourself into a corner, you finally crack out the solution and then you get...  A single loving shieldstone for your half hour or whatever of trouble. This game displays just an outright disdain for the player sometimes, goddamn.        This is an insanely bad deal, by the way, this guy sells you 5 rations for 30 Burlas when you can get 14 ration-packs for that price all over the gameworld. Croc meat, tho.   A house where we just get told to gently caress off. No, this is unconnected to anything and never changes.        Once again, everyone in Antara has lead poisoning. Why the gently caress is this guy just randomly admitting to murdering politicians? We could be Imperial Shadows! Assassins out to avenge a dead Jaeger! Just public-minded citizens who want to stab and/or arrest an unrepentant murderer! But no, we accept his cookies, don't judge him and then learn more about killing people. Seriously what the gently caress. No, just. This entire interaction is baffling.   The local store is mostly notable for selling Senwater and Grounding Wire, it also pays a slightly better price for looted armor than the store in Torlith and is a second place to buy Montari Plate, albeit at a higher price. Ultimately, Keth is just a truck stop, so we continue south to Choth since it's one of the towns in the region where the writers display some fun and creativity.    If you're not obsessive about staying on the road, you can skip several fights by just heading across the grass from Keth to Choth. The special thing about Choth is that everyone has a tale to tell.         Pirate stories!    A store that sells exciting new swords we won't need.         Gory murder stories! This one is my favourite, personally.           Isekai stories! I want to kinda punch this guy.          Heroic stories!           Plague stories!           War stories! I think we need a drink after all that, let's go to the inn.   Bartender! Tend me your strongest bars!     I love the idea of the Liar's Festival, now... depending on who you pick, you're going to get a separate reward. The only one you can't pick is the "Hero," the guy who said he saved Princess Aurora, because he's the only one actually telling the truth(and thus, hilariously, the only one that William doesn't believe). I will be picking the Soldier because his reward is insanely much better than any of the others. What do the others get us, though? quote:Mage Gordostorini : you'll received 3 charluda's chain We don't want Carluda's Chains, fake maps are obviously not good, Halder's Brew is like wasting inventory space on a worse version of Adrenaline casts, an extra Shadowring would be good, but not as good as what the Soldier gets us.     Aside from the Everedge, we also get a 100% quality Tower Shield, but the Everedge... oh boy. Stat-wise it beats both the Broadsword and the local Onyx Blade for sale, plus it always stays at 100% so it never needs sharpening and never loses any effectiveness(plus we haven't blessed it yet...). There's one sword in the game that can do more damage on a Hack attack(almost twice the damage modifier on that, holy cow), but it's not quite as accurate and we can't get it until almost at the end of the game. It's actually kind of absurd that you can get such a good reward and then so many awful rewards with no real hint as to which is gameplay-wise the superior choice.  So that was a nice visit to Choth, next... we'll go to Imazi! It's not immediately obvious, but we can actually return to Pianda in this chapter! I don't think any town but Imazi has updated content, but I think folks will enjoy the Imazi updates.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:06
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